3 posts tagged “hike”

This was the mega-day. If Day 2 was an endurance-trial, this was the iron-man of vacation adventure.

We booked a 10:40am glacier hike at the Athabasca Glacier up in the Columbia Icefields. The meeting spot for the tour was a 2 hour 40 minute drive from the hotel and the rental place opened at 8am. So I drove pretty fast down the two-lane "ice highway" (93) to get there. Angela was a little nervous about missing the tour and encouraged me to pass the RV's that clog that road up. We made it.  Here are a bunch of facts we learned (you can skip these and still follow the story):

* The Columbia Icefields is the biggest ice-field outside the arctic circle
* Several glaciers are fed by the Columbia Icefield--ours was just one of four or five, but it was the easiest to get to
* The end of a glacier is called the terminal (or maybe "terminus"?)
* The piles of debris that a glacier pushes in front of it have a special name too, but I forget.
* There's a different, special name for the piles of debris that get pushed to the side of a glacier. Forgot that too.
* Glaciers are like rivers of ice. They move by "flowing" downhill--just slowly. They grow when snow falls up towards the top of the glacier and gets packed down over the years (under meters of more snow) until it's eventually compressed to ice. The ice flows downhill--gavity is what moves a glacier.
* At the Athabasca glacier, they think that the ice that forms up at the top takes 150 years to make it to the foot of the glacier
* It's normal for glaciers to advance in the winter and recede in the summer, but lately the glaciers have been receding a lot more than they've been advancing
* Even in the past four years the guide showed us that the glacier used to be a few dozen yards ahead of where it is now at this same time of year
* Our guide's name was Graham. Important for later.
* Most ice looks white because it has air bubbles on it. But glacial ice has been packed down so much, it has no air bubbles and looks blue.
* There's a ton of suspended rock particles (and rocks) in the ice. When the ice melts, it leaves behind "rock flour"--a gritty, inorganic paste of finely ground rocks
* The ground that the glacier moves over gets scraped by all rocks that are being moved along and the glacier acts like a mega-sandpaper. The rocks we clambered over in the beginning all showed lots of scratches (all in the direction of the glaciers movement)
* Glacial-fed lakes often have two colors. A latte-color where the glacial water feeds the lake (caused by all the particles in suspension), and then a bright torquois on the other side of the lake where the particle matter has settled down. I can't remember why it's sooo torquois, though.

Enough facts. Onto the hike!

We started off in a rocky area and climbed up to the foot of the glacier. Along the way we passed a fast-moving stream of extremely cold water--the glacial run-off. The foot of the glacier is snowy on top--not pure ice. This is one of the more dangerous parts because the snow could be covering a crevasse. Our guide, Graham, made a point of poking the snow with a collapsable snow-poker (designed for this purpose) to make sure we only walked in a path where there was solid ice below us. Graham emphasized the importance of going single-file during this part.

Then we got to the ice. The ice was very blue and suprisingly uneven. It looked like a ridge-y mogul field. In the valleys (these were usually only 3' deep) were often rivers of just barely liquid water running down the glacier. The cool spots were where the water actually ran into the glacier in a kind of under-"ground" river. These entrances to the inner plumbing are called "mill wells" and they are extremely dangerous. If you fall in, you probably won't come out for several years. We peeked down one of them (our guide held one wrist to make sure we didn't fall) and it tumbled down 15' or so into darkness. Scary.

The whole hike is totally up-hill. We passed several more mill wells and a big pole that was drilled into the ice. An expedition years earlier had drilled all the way down through the glacier to hard ground to see how deep it was. Deep. The part we were on was 200 to 300m thick. Wow. The pole has migrated down (since the glacier moves) over the years and was only 1-2km  from the beginning of our hike.

The whole hike was 3, maybe 3 1/2 hours. Tiring, but not that hard. The other way to experience the glacier (for cheaters) is to take one of the three-axled mega-buses up the specially plowed ice road. Then you get off, hang out for a few and go back down. The buses were pretty neat though. Made by Brewster (who seems to make all the tour buses around here), six giant wheels and 500,000 CN each.

When we made it back, Graham thanked us for being a good group and then confessed that not only was it his first day on the job, but we were his first tour. Awesome!

In our rush to get to the glacier, we skipped a lot of beautiful sites. So on the way back we decided to take some of them in. Peyto lake is a prime example of one of these uber-blue glacial lakes. Muddy on one side and magic-looking on the other. Totally beautiful. There was a short trail from a parking lot to Peyto lake and a much, much longer trail that we took right after.

One of our books described a pretty meadow we could get to via this other trail. Plus, we'd been told there were bald eagles in these parts. So... we ended up climbing pretty far up this mountain. At least a couple hours. I was exhausted and a little cranky by this point--apparently I'd reached my capacity for adventure. But it wasn't over! We got to a really cool bowl/meadow at the almost-top of this peak. We were the only people for miles around. And we saw... marmots! Lots of marmots scurrying around the rocks, grass and snow. Huge, fat, furry squirel-looking creatures. I'd never seen one so this was a treat. We spent a good 15 minutes marmot-watching and later decided this would be "Marmot Peak" (to us). We heard a really loud bird call and got our hopes up for seeing a bald eagle, but no dice.

On the way down I spotted a spruce grouse (we looked up the name later) walking across the path. They're pretty big (house-cat size) and very, very camoflauged. Angela conducted another behavior experiment to see if spruce grouse can fly, but I called off the experiment after one of her rocks landed really close. Inconclusive. They can flap, but if they can fly, you have to *really* provoke them to see it.

Back to the car. We stopped by Lake Louise on the way back (beautiful) and looked at the newer Fairmont hotel there. Not as castle-y, but much cooler location. Right out of a fairy tale. We ate at the Deer Lodge and I had a buffalo pastrami sandwhich (delicious!)

But the day was still not over! We still hadn't seen a bear. So instead of taking the highway back from Lake Louise to Banff, we took the Bow Valley Parkway. This road is just two lanes and its inside the wild-life protecting fence that keeps most animals off of the main road. According to our guide book it "offers the best chance to see wildlife from your car". So we drove most of it at about 15 mph scanning both side of the road. It was pretty exhausting. Around 9:30pm (it's still light at this time) I pointed out that we weren't going to get home for quite a while at that pace (Banff was still 30km away). Just before the road re-joined the main highway we saw a car pulled off to the side (a good sign!). Three huge elk were right there grazing by the side of the road. Right there! We could see the veins on their necks as they chewed. I unrolled the window to take some pictures, but one of them decided to eat the grass right beside the car so we quick rolled it back up and moved away.

We visited El Yunque ("The Anvil") rain forest preserve today. To prep for the trip, we spent an hour last night researching the plant, insect and animal life of the forest. Notably, we read up on the lives of stick bugs in a fictional magazine Walking Stick Weekly. I love that someone devoted the time to create a magazine, by stick bugs, for stick bugs that reviews fictional scientific literature that contains real facts. And that they did it in flash. It's great.

So we spent a good part of today looking for walking sticks (aka stick bugs). I'll upload a picture of our find later.

Here are the highlights and learnings of El Yunque...

* There's a small water fall with fresh water shrimp and little crabs in the pool at the bottom. Surrounding the pool are Peurto Ricans eating hot dogs (seriously).

* The paths in the forest are paved, which sounds lame, but is actually required. The ground is wet, effectively, always. El Yunque gets about 10 feet of rainfall annually. So anything other than a paved path would be no fun to walk on. They made this path fun to walk on by keeping it extremely narrow and pretty steep. (If you ever visit and want to retrace our steps, we took the Mina trail down to the falls and "Big Tree" trail back up and then walked a kilometer or so on the road)

* There are so many plant species it's ridiculous. Even looking at a single tree, there are five or six different types of vines or "air plants" (epiphytes) growing on the tree--and usually some moss. The competition for sunlight is fierce. Fast growing bamboo, seeds that sit dormant in the ground until a hurricane or landslide wipe out competing trees and then spring up really fast to take advantage of a break in the canopy, leaves that are sombrero-size wide...

* Another neat thing about the leaves are their shapes. We learned that the plants don't want to let them get soggy from accumulated water so they all have elaborate grooves, rides and often a rubbery coating. Many of the leaves have throny sides and some of them even have thorns growing on the face of the leaves. The goal is to not have your leaves get eaten.

* Stick bugs eat the leaves and there are about 0.4 stick bugs per square meter in the forest (not making that up, see the Walking Stick Weekly magazine above). I think snails must eat the leaves--we saw a lot of pretty big snails in the forest (shells just a little bit smaller than your palm).

* Tons of spider webs just off the path, but most of them belonged to the same species of small spider. I saw one catch something small, but it ate whatever it was right away before I could get a picture.

* The sounds of the forest are really cool. Coquis frogs, lots of different bird sounds, the running water, the crackling of wood as tree rubs on tree in the wind, the sound of large leaves falling from the canopy to the ground... it's the stuff meditation tapes are made of.

* Which reminds me: we got there about 8:30am, ahead of the tourists. Do not go with a tour guide or near a tour guide and definitely get there early--the park opens at 7:30am. When we were getting back to our car there were was a group going down with a guide. His loud voice and semi-apathetic entourage made us glad we were out of there before they got started.

* Lizards! El Yunque is home to a metric shit-load of lizards and Angela caught one! It almost immediately took a crap on her, but I snapped a couple good pictures. I got the feeling she thought it was worth it. I love her.

* Butterflies. A few semi-remarkable butterflies flitting around. Which reminds me of the butterfly art gallery we saw later in the day in Old San Juan.

* This whole time (we were hiking about two hours) we spent a good portion of it looking for stick bugs. I feel like I got a more complete El Yunque experience because I took so much time and mental energy to really examine each leaf and stick at our stops. I'm not being sarcastic either--we really drank this place in. It's magical.

Early start today for some scuba diving!

* We dove with Copa Marina Beach Resort. Great staff, beautiful location, beautiful premises. The diving itself was kind of ho-hum. The highlight was Angela got another close encounter with a giant green moray eel (biggest one yet). We didn't get to do the famous wall-dive because the sea was too choppy and the captain didn't want to risk getting caught in a storm that far from shore (it was looking pretty dark).

* The first dive was about 60' or so. Noting that here because the dive book is out of pages.

* In between dives, I was goofing around in the water with my mask and fins and did a little free dive to 15' or 20'. Big no-no. Apparently, free-diving is a really bad idea if you dove the same day. Lung damage kind of bad. So... no more of that.

* Second dive was about the same as the first. I stayed a little bit higher than the rest of the group because I got a little worried about lung damage from my equipment-less expedition. Also, we were getting cold. Nothing especially notable besides a big puffer and, what I think was, a smallish tuna (which was still elbow-to-fingertips long).

* On the way back, I got sea sick for the first time I can remember. No fun at all. This dive-master's cure for sea-sickness was to pour really cold water down my back. It made me forget being sick, that's for sure! He suggested that I take off my shortie (wet suit) to stay cool because that would help my queasiness. My sea-sickness went away, but now I'm really sun-burned from riding back to shore without anything on my back or shoulders. D'oh.

* Next came the real highlight of the day: the Guanica Dry Forest. We went for a two hour hike and, before I go into the details, I will first say: a) we didn't plan for it to be so long, b) we were the only ones in the park, c) when we got back at 4:40pm on a Friday the one guy manning the booth was pissed that he didn't get to go home early. On to the details...

* Lots of lizards--these ones with color! All sorts of trees, cactus, "air moss", flowers, etc. Allegedly there are over 400 species of birds in this park: we saw three and I have a picture of an iridescent green one that I'll upload later. The real high light were the hidden caves.

* Off of the main trail (way off the main trail actually) I spotted a crevice that angeled down. On closer inspection, it opened up to a big cave--two story house size--with adjacent rooms equally large and lit from above so we could see. It looked some people had been there before us so we had to check it out. We're about an hour from the guard station and, remember, we're *the only ones* in the park at this point. So we descended into the caves and explored around. Big rooms, some cool rock structures, giant (dead) insects and some cool green rock walls. On the third chamber we got a little nervous about where it was going and how we'd get back.

* It took some mental energy but we made it back to the off-the-trail mini-trail that we came from and eventually back to a real trail. Note to anyone visiting Guanica: the map is not even topologically correct. Forget scale (which is also wrong), but the trails don't even join up the way it says they do. With that realization, we decided to retrace our steps and made the hour-plus up-hill trek back to the guard. He greeted us with some angry Spanish that began with "Momasita..." and probably ended with "... and the other guys are already down at the bar!"

* An interesting aside on the roads of Peurto Rico: they don't have many overpasses so most of the "express ways" have stop lights. It was pouring rain on the way back. Angela's been reading me magazine articles during our drives, but she's pretty well-mined her stolen copy of "Psychology Today" so we listened to some Latin-American disco mix on the radio. Cool. The radio DJ actually mixed the songs together instead of just talking over the music: I liked it.

* ... and back home to the Marriott in Aguidilla. Which brings us to right now. -phew-