From Alberta to Zap

We had a lot of linear space to deal with on this trip. Driving sanely — no all-nighters two nights in a row, for example — it takes roughly three long days, maybe 10 to 12 hours of driving each day, to reach the Canadian Rockies from metro Chicago, including the inevitable stops (which are more frequent with children in the backseat). Stacking three days like that in a row would seriously tedious, but fortunately we had the luxury of two weeks’ time, so we were able to include one “rest” day going and coming.

Alberta, then, was the major destination, famed in tourist lore and literature, and lately featured as a starring backdrop in Brokeback Mountain, passing for Wyoming. But we also had a minor destination: North Dakota, famed for not much.

Still, the state had much to recommend it to us. It was roughly halfway, we’d never visited it before, and for that matter not a lot of other people visit ND, which makes it an appealing little gear to whirl next to the big-gear destination of Alberta. Seven days and eights nights in different parts of Alberta were thus complemented by four nights and three days in ND.

When we finally encountered the Canadian Rockies, entering Banff National Park on the morning of July 5, I thought about all the other mountains I’d ever seen. The Colorado Rockies and assorted western ranges from West Texas to Idaho; various Appalachian ranges from Tennessee to New England; the Swiss and Tyrolean Alps; the Japanese Alps and the mountains of Hokkaido; the range that forms the spine of Korea; even the Yablonovyy Range on the east shore of Lake Baikal, a spectre in the distance, as if the Colorado Rockies were set next to Lake Michigan, though later I learned that the Yablonovyy are nowhere near that large.

Impressive, each and every range. But not as impressive as the mountains in front of me last week. What is it about the Canadian Rockies? Their massiveness? The mix of barren-topped peaks with lower, wooded ones? They way they soak up the sunsets? The periodic sight of glaciers? The ribbony waterfalls, sometimes in cascades that looked like the mountain was melting? The certain knowledge that, despite a few roads and certain amenities, that these are wild places given over to wild creatures and wild weather?

On the afternoon of July 7, we reached Jasper National Park by way of the Icefields Parkway, a two-lane road connecting the two parks, and a travel event in and of itself—easily one of the most remarkable drives I’ve ever taken. By then we’d taken walks around Banff NP to see forested ground and waterfalls and swift rivers passing through gorges and by meadows with outbursts of wildflowers. And we’d visited some hot springs and taken a side trip into Kootenay National Park in BC.

In Jasper NP, we ogled more mountains, took more walks, visited another hot spring, rode a cable car nearly to the top of a mountain, and backtracked down the Icefields Parkway one day to take a bus ride on a glacier.

As for North Dakota, we broke that destination in two parts as well. After a hard drive from Chicago, we spent two nights and a day in Fargo, where we found plenty to do, such as visit a museum that had collected old-time buildings from all over that part of Dakota, and a small zoo that featured, among other critters, a South American terrible poison-dart frog (really, that was its common name in English).

Returning from the mountains, we spent another two nights in far western North Dakota, ultimately seeing both parts of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The North and South Units, the Park Service calls them, something very different from mountains. Badlands. Quite beautiful in places, including along I-94, for those who believe that the Interstate’s completely monotonous.

Returning across ND, I couldn’t resist two final stops in the state. One stop was in Bismarck, for a few minutes at the state capitol, a domeless structure that reminded me of the Daily Planet building without the orb. The other place was Zap, ND, site of a queer incident in 1969. It wasn’t really much out of the way, so I stopped, just to say I’d been to Zap, ND.