Disclaimer.  This is an adventure I took when I was about 11 years old, over 40 years ago.  There will be things I misremember, and there will probably be lies and exaggerations.  The pictures are stolen from modern websites, but the scenery hasn’t changed.  Glibs needs content, so I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel of my memory to deliver.  I aim to please.  I also shoot to kill, so don’t get any ideas.  With that out of the way, allez, allez, allez.

Before I became the Middle Age Man in Lycra, I was a young boy in sweatpants and a down jacket.  My parents’ bike club took a tour of the Canadian Rockies from Jasper to Banff on the Icefields Parkway, about 180 miles over six days.  There were about 18 of us in 3 RVs/campers, 9 of which were in our RV made to sleep six.  It was a tight fit.

The first leg of our journey we drove up I-5 to Vancouver.  Us two kids in our RV rode in the space above the cab watching the dragonflies splat on the windshield as we drove through the rice fields of the Sacramento Valley.  Good fun.  No seatbelts.  This was the 70s, man.  After a layover in Bend to sleep, and a stop near Seattle to weld the frame on the rusted trailer that carried our bikes, we finally pulled into the trailer park outside of Vancouver.  I thought Canada was supposed to be nice, but they have trailer parks just like the rest of us.  The rec room even had a video game, Death Race, where the goal was to run over pedestrians with a car, which made me believe Canadians have a dark side.  This is probably where Canada’s slippery slope to euthanasia began. 

Death Race

We spent a day in Vancouver riding around Stanley Park taking advantage of what was to be the only sunny day of our trip.  For dinner I remember having a Hawaiian hot dog, which is a hot dog wrapped in bacon and topped with pineapple.  It’s a cousin of the pineapple pizza, which was also invented in Canada.  Like I said, Canadians have a dark side.  It ain’t all Tim Horton’s and poutine.

The next day we drove up the Fraser River Canyon, past Kamloops, which I remember because of its funny name, and on to Jasper, where we checked into a hotel.  Though the trip had barely begun, the RV was beginning to feel a little cramped.  Maybe not so much for the kids, but certainly for the adults.  My father, an old tin can sailor, used to say that a boat gets about a foot shorter every day you are on it.  The same applies to RVs.  I still remember one of the women stepping into the RV and saying, “Jesus Christ!  Someone light a cigarette and freshen this place up!”

It wasn’t this crowded, but it felt like it.

In Jasper we met up with the other two groups.  The first was a family with 4 kids plus one cousin in their own RV, and the second an older couple traveling by themselves with a trailer.  The riding started with a 30 mile ride from Jasper to Honeymoon Lake.  I was on a borrowed white Peugeot 10-speed that was way too big for me and had toe clips which I had never used before, but it was better suited for the ride than the BMX bike that I rode to school.  I had never ridden a bike with multiple gears before, my toes barely reached the pedals, and down jackets aren’t very aerodynamic, so I was soon outpaced by nearly everyone on their fancy custom aluminum bikes with silk tires.  The shoulder was wide and there was no risk of getting lost, but the thought of an 11 year old riding on the highway alone in a foreign country drinking water from streams at the side of the road would probably be unheard of these days.  My wife thinks my parents were trying to kill me.  She may be right, but I look at it as a character building exercise.

On the road.

The campsites along the way had covered shelters that allowed people to stay out of the rain while cooking.  Sleeping was prohibited there, but the grownups kicked the kids out to give them more room in the RVs leaving us to sleep in the shelters anyway.  There I learned how to play truth or dare and spin the bottle, but what happens on the Icefield Parkway, stays on the Icefield Parkway.

Honeymoon Lake

Day 2 we rode down to the Columbia Icefields.  Our campsite was across the way from the glaciers.  We could hear the sounds of the glacier, alternating between what sounded like cannon fire and thunder.  It was pretty awesome.  The next day we took a snow cat tour of the glacier and got a late start to the next campground.  While waiting to begin our ride, a mama bear and two cubs strolled through our campsite and we took shelter inside the RVs until they moved along.

Canadian Bus

Subsequent campsites had more signs of bear activity.  We were kept up one night by campers yelling at a bear to keep it away.  Another campsite had a massive bear trap which was basically a large pipe with a trap door that would slide down if a bear or a child went to the far end of it.  At that point the kids moved back into the RVs to sleep, though in hindsight, maybe we should have slept in the bear trap with the door closed.

As we got close to Lake Louise the weather turned rainy which made people less enthused about riding.  Traffic was also getting heavier and the road less safe.  Up to this point most of the traffic had consisted of tour buses full of Japanese tourists probably looking for real estate to buy as this was when Japan was about to take over the world economically.  Or so we thought.  I think there’s a separated bike trail now between Banff and Lake Louise.  Anyway, due to the rain and the traffic, we drove the rest of the way to Banff where we checked into another hotel allowing us to wash up and have some private space.

Bow Lake

After a day at Lake Louise and a rafting trip down the Bow River, it was time to head home.  First stop was Coeur d’Alene, Idaho where we failed to see any white supremacist compounds, but the news assures me they are there.  After that we made a beeline for home.  The grownups were getting cranky.

Obviously it was a memorable trip if I’m writing about it more than 40 years later.  One of these days I’d like to do it again, but there’s no way I’d go in an RV with that many people.