Wednesday, June 26, 2024. We had an easy drive from Lake Louise to the middle of nowhere Kootenay Plains. This campground can be best called “primitive”. No electricity, no water, no internet, no cell service…

We had a communal dinner in the little camp cabin – reminiscent of The Parent Trap – that was very nice…

After dinner we had a campfire using real logs – none of that propane silliness… (of course, I dislike campfires of any kind…)

We had our usual bagpipe serenade Always nice…

We returned to the Villa and had a cold night’s sleep…

On Thursday, June 27, we headed out for our adventure in Banff National Park at the Columbia Ice Fields…

And miracles of miracles, we had cell phone service. And our phones started buzzing! The day we had dreaded had arrived…

Back in February, 2015, our son, John, met his service dog Yan for the first time…

Yan has been “under the weather” for about two months…

So today John made the heart-wrenching decision to let him go… John said, “He was trying so hard, but he had nothing left…”

He was a good dog…

(Tearful interlude here…)

But we had a glacier we had to see…

This glacier was formed when ice covered the entire area of North America. The snow kept falling and eventually got so thick and heavy that it compressed into ice. The original icepack was as tall as these adjacent mountains…

Over thousands of years the ice has been slowly melting, filling adjacent rivers and lakes. This glacier is melting and sliding down down the hill at the rate of a few inches per year…

If you look carefully at the picture below you can see a tiny bus on the ice with several people walking around… That bus is about 20′ tall and 40′ long…

The “bus” ride to the glacier travels down a 30% grade – like a very slow, bumpy roller coaster…

Here you see some hikers on the glacier…

This is the “bus” we arrived in… Those tires are five feet diameter!

So we all exited the bus and walked on the ice. This ice is only 10% air. Normal freezer ice is 50% air. This ice resembles the ice you might get in your cocktail in a really fancy restaurant…

So we walked on the glacier… There is not much to do except avoid falling down…

I wasn’t realty grumpy, but my feet were cold… Rainbow sandals don’t do well on a glacier…!

Lynda is barely taller than the tires…

We returned to the Visitors Center and had lunch, then we headed out to the Skywalk… A great tourist attraction…

This walkway is cantilevered out over the canyon and river below. And the floor is glass!

So you walk out onto this glass floor 800′ above the rocks and look for mountain goats. We found a few…

I loved the architecture of the Skywalk, particularly the loose rock retaining walls…

After the Skywalk we headed back to our primitive campsite…

We had dinner in the capm cabin in the pouring rain. No campfire tonight…

We returned to the Villa. An enjoyable time was had by all…