Thursday evening, Alicia told me she wasn’t feeling well. I ran around like a madman in the huge Fairmont “Chateau Lake Louise” and found that the extent of their medical expertise was very limited. The Chateau is actually up the hill from the village of Lake Louise which has no medical facilities, relying instead on the hospital and clinic in nearby Banff. They were able to send a medic to the room to check her vitals and the diagnosis was that, because we were at about 5800 feet elevation (even more in metric!), she was suffering from elevation sickness, something they see on a regular basis.
This morning (Friday) she was feeling miserable, unable to eat or drink, but still able to climb into the bus.
We boarded a bus that was to take us, indirectly, to Jasper National Park on the north end of the Ice Field Parkway, a distance of about 150 miles. We had stops along the way, some for pictures, some for “rest stops”, one for lunch, and one for a special opportunity. Through it all, Alicia sat on the bus, sleeping off and on, and missing for the most part many of the 260+ glaciers, and a similar number of stunning mountain peaks. Many of same had names, few of which are recorded in my memory bank, so I will simply post them here, in no particular order.
This one I know - the iconic site of Lake Louise
This is the head waters of one of the five rivers our route followed. The water appears from the delta formed by the ground rock and soil being pushed ahead of the gradually descending glacier.
This one is either Tango or Tangle Falls.
This is the highway south of The Big Bend, engineered into the building of the highway in the 1960s so as to add length to the ascent of the mountain, thus lessening the degree of grade to a point where buses and trucks could successfully climb up and over.
One of our stops was at the “Sky Walk,” a glass platform that struts out from the mountain side, offering an incredible view in additional directions.
The Athabaskan Glacier is one of the six main glaciers that extend like toes from the massive Columbia Icefield. The Columbia Icefield is the largest in North America and is uniquely located so as to supply fresh water from a rare triple divide. From there, the water flows to three oceans - the Pacific, the Arctic and, after flowing to and through Hudson Bay, the Atlantic.
After lunch, we were transported across the highway and up… and up, to the glacier walk. Here we were able to take an ice explorer out onto a glacier where we were released into the wild.
Always wanting to be helpful, I volunteered to get out and help push one of the vehicles up a 30 degree incline.
Standing atop the glacier with crevasses running to unknown depths under our feet we were able to slip, slide, and splash across the surface of a glacier.
It’s like they always say, you haven’t lived until you’ve dipped a toe (or other appendage) into glaciated water!
Water runs into, and under, the lateral moraine of Athabasca Glacier.
From there we rode north to the town of Jasper, a town which suffered the loss of about 30% of its housing and much of its scenery, to large wildfires last year. We made our way past large parking areas filled with temporary housing and, after dropping off a few of our fellow travelers in town, proceeded to the main lodge at Jasper National Park.
We were handed pre-assigned room numbers, with a wooden magnetic key card (who’d a thunk it!) and made our way slowly to our rooms. “Slowly” as in our pace as we walked to the cottage-style rooms where we were to stay. “Slowlier” was the pace of our luggage being transported to the rooms. Before ours arrived, we had decided to have medical staff check in on Alicia, only to discover that the park staff was trained only in First Aid and was unable even to measure her temperature. (That’s okay, it would have been in metric degrees anyway, and heaven only knows what that means.)
The staff member checked and found that the town clinic was closed until Monday (No one in Canada is allowed to get sick on a weekend, so they give the doctors the weekends off.) The only available option was the Jasper Hospital, where we spent the next three metric hours being tested and waiting for the only doctor. (He told us he works a 62 hour shift each weekend!)
Welcome to the much-lauded Canadian healthcare system. If you are not a Canadian citizen the emergency room fee of $600 must be paid in advance (they accept cash or credit card). Then, if you get to see the one and only doctor, you pay a separate $700 fee (cash or card) the bill for which is sent directly from the doctor’s phone! This fee must be paid prior to leaving the hospital!
We made it back to our room well after all food services were suspended for the night, so let it be known that much of the grumbling you just heard was only my stomach.
This morning (Saturday), Alicia is feeling better, I’ve eaten, and I’ve been sitting here, on the edge of the lake, in a tee shirt, writing for an hour and a half. All’s well with the world again!
Comments
Post a Comment