Banff & Jasper
September 1, 1998
8/5 Heading west from Calgary, AB on the Trans-Canada Highway, we're initially driving through vast expanses of grain fields. Some fields show the pale gold hues of maturity, and we see a few combines just beginning harvest season. The terrain gradually becomes rolling hills, and grain gives way to cattle and hay. From Calgary, the Rocky Mountains were just a hazy shadow on the horizon. As we drive, the mountains rise and sharpen, until we're suddenly among them.
The Banff National Park campgrounds don't take reservations, so we've tried to hurry a little, and arrived at the Tunnel Mountain Trailer Area at about noon, parking in a long line of trailers which creep very slowly toward the registration booth. After about 20 minutes in line, we're initially told that the desirable single-occupancy sites are all taken, and that we'll share hookups - two RV's end-to-end, one backing in, in a single pull-through site. Then, they decide that we are too long to fit in that configuration and that we'll have to take an electricity-only site and get in line for a full-hookup site tomorrow. Then, they somehow discover that, oops, there is one full-hookup site left. So we're comfortably installed in a large pull-through site. The 320 full-service sites are terraced up the side of a wooded hill, well spaced so that each site has a view through gaps in the trees to the mountains across the valley. We're paying $22, which is about $14.50 US. There are another 810 RV sites in adjacent areas which have either electricity only or no hookups, but are large enough for big RV's. A large overflow area insures that no one will be turned away, although it's quite likely that late arrivals will spend their first night in a temporary parking area, getting preference for site assignment the next morning. Even the overflow area is nicer than many campgrounds we've been in: these vehicles are parked on one lane of a smooth, level, blacktop access road, two terraces above us on the wooded hillside.
The RV facilities in the Canadian National Parks are far superior to those in the US National parks - and we've now been in quite a few of both and can begin to generalize with some validity. In Canada, we often find that the campgrounds are large, well maintained, and located so as to have scenic beauty from all or most of the campsites. In the US parks, the campsites are often small, crowded, lacking facilities, and poorly maintained.
8/6 The Sulphur Mountain Gondola rises several thousand feet to a restaurant and viewing platform on a ridge near the summit. A boardwalk leads half a mile to a viewing platform on a promontory overlooking the town and the Bow River valley. A rough trail leads along the ridge in the opposite direction, about a mile to a rocky summit. Helen walked both, but stopped short of the steep, trailless, scramble to the summit. Dave did the summit scramble, which required some exploration for a route.
One possible route led along a horizontal crack in a cliff, providing a level path that was sometimes less than a foot wide, in the middle of a sheer rock face that extended 100 feet or more both up and down, at an angle of about 80 degrees. It was an easy walk, but not a place for acrophobes. It turned out to be a dead end. The real route to the top was up an inconspicuous steep crack. It rose steeply and initially looked very dangerous and challenging, but turned out to have plenty of foot- and handholds, making an easy climb. The view from the top was spectacular. While I rested and enjoyed the view, I was entertained by a golden-mantled ground squirrel. It's the size of a red squirrel, but has prominent black and white stripes on its sides, similar to a chipmunk.
We spent a little time checking out the possibilities for EMail and SnailMail. The campground has only a small registration booth at the gate, not a likely place to find a phone hookup. Mailboxes Etc. in the village of Banff was friendly and cooperative, although they will charge $4.00 for 15 minutes of phone time, and $2.00 to accept delivery of a mail package from Federal Express. We've heard recent stories about big US Mail packets being turned back at the border, and other stories of long delivery time for mail coming across the border, so we've decided to pay the small difference to use Fed Ex. Their international package service typically takes two days, but of course they need a real street address as a delivery destination. Private campgrounds will usually accept these deliveries, but it's difficult or impossible in a National Park campground - which has administrative offices elsewhere and has no provisions for receiving deliveries at the campground itself. We also discovered that the FedEx option also speeds up handling at the Escapees end of things. They can send a FedEx package the same day we call, but can't send a US Mail package until the day after we call.
8/8 The afternoon was spent driving the Bow Valley Parkway (Route 1A) and the Banff-Windemere Highway (Route 93) The latter crosses the continental divide in Vermilion Pass and continues through Kootenay National Park, although we went only as far as Marble Canyon and The Paint Pots. Marble Canyon is an easy one-mile hike up a small stream which has cut down through a limestone formation, carving a deep narrow canyon. The trail provides numerous overlooks of the interesting water-carved and polished walls, and ends at an attractive waterfall.
A one-mile trail leads to The Paint Pots - cool springs which have deposited mounds of ochre - yellowish red iron oxides. In places, the valley floor is covered with a deep deposit of these oxides. The Indians traveled to here to obtain this pigment, which they used extensively to color tipis and clothing, and for rock and body painting. In the late 19th century, the pigment was mined by hand and shipped east for paint manufacture. In the early 20th century, mining equipment was brought in. Some of this equipment, abandoned when the area became a national park, is still visible.
8/9 While Helen slept in, I rose early and drove to The Stanley Glacier trailhead in Vermilion Pass, just west of the continental divide. But I'm not heading to Stanley Glacier. Rather, I'm going to climb Mt. Whymper, on the north side of the pass. It's a trailless peak, with the ascent described as "moderate" difficulty in the book "Scrambles in the Canadian Rockies". The term "scramble" apparently means climbing on rock that is not challenging enough to require technical equipment - ropes, pitons, etc. The parking lot is at 5250 feet elevation, and the peak is 9350 feet. (I'm back to English units again - the Canadian topographic maps for this area have not yet been converted to metric).
The first part of the climb is steep, but the only challenge is in finding a route through a tangle of downed trees. This area is subject to frequent avalanches, and also had a forest fire in 1968. The combination makes for difficult going. When I found the track of a fairly recent avalanche, the going was quite easy - the ground had been cleared nicely, and not much had grown back (the growing season is only about six weeks long here). Non-avalanche areas were crisscrossed with a tangle of giant trees which were killed by the fire and eventually blown down, interspersed with a miniature forest of young spruce and alder, which grows in such a dense thicket that it hides the deadfalls and is almost impossible to walk through. Higher up, I climbed along a dry waterway. The spring runoff keeps the waterway clear of everything but rocks, so that most of the time, the only challenge was to avoid breaking an ankle while clambering up a wild mixture of loose rock. Occasionally, a band of harder rock created a waterfall over a vertical cliff (now dry but water-polished), and route finding got interesting. Sometimes, I could pick my way up the rock face, using cracks in the rock for hand- and toeholds. In other cases, I had to explore along the base of the cliff until a climbable gap appeared.
Finally, at about the 8000-foot level, after over four hours of scrambling, I ran into a cliff that stopped me. After exploring both directions, I could find nothing that I was willing to climb without ropes. It's just as well: I'm tired, it's past lunchtime, and there's a gorgeous view from this point. I've reached a ridge where the view opens out to the north. The northeast face of this ridge is a 500' vertical cliff dropping to a hanging valley, and I'm standing right on the edge. Northwest, up this valley, I can see across a valley to high mountains. To the southeast, I can look across Vermilion Pass down into a series of hanging valleys, which still have a great deal of ice. The largest of these valleys is home to Stanley Glacier, and I have a good view of the glacier and of several subsidiary icefields on the north and east slopes.
The trip back down was tedious but uneventful. I took a slightly different route, hoping to avoid a couple of the little cliffs, but simply found different cliffs, which I had little trouble picking my way down. I arrived back at the truck at about 4 PM, with sore legs and feet. The total distance traveled was only a few miles, but nearly all of it was uneven, often loose, rock, and I used muscles that weren't used to being treated that way. Also, the total elevation gain was about 2800 feet and, it's been a long time since I did that much. All in all, a very enjoyable day. During the entire day, I saw no evidence of other humans - no candy wrappers, no names scratched into rocks, no beer cans. I did occasionally follow trails, but they were made by mountain goats or bighorn sheep, not people.
Although I brought a compass, a 50,000:1 topographical map, and a GPS receiver, none of this equipment was really needed. These high, open, mountain faces allow visual navigation, and I always had several unmistakable landmarks in view. For much of the hike, I could actually see my truck.
We recently added light, compact, 8x30 Minolta binoculars to our hiking equipment, and I carry them almost everywhere. Our older 10x50 binoculars are so bulky and heavy that they generally stayed in the truck, and as a result, didn't get used much.
8/11 This evening we took a walk to Bow Falls, on the edge of town, and then up to the historic old Banff Hotel, on the hill above. We stopped to watch a soccer game on a field adjacent to the hotel. Two elk were grazing along the sidelines, at the midfield line, ignoring the frenzied mob of humans who were running up and down the field. Not until a hard-kicked but misdirected ball crashed directly into one of the elk did they trot back 50 feet or so from the edge of the field. Even then, they simply resumed grazing, a little further from the action.
We've seen elk in the campground and all around town. They seem intelligent and street-smart. Twice, we've seen small groups of elk walk to the roadside, wait until traffic stopped in both directions, then casually walk across the road and continue on their route. We've heard that it's not unusual to see an elk walking though the downtown area. We drove through the golf course, and saw dozens of elk on the fairway, which must add to the challenge of playing the course.
The hotel is a huge castle-like edifice, built of large timbers and local limestone with innumerable turrets and towers. It was built a long time ago (I haven't seen a date), by the Canadian Pacific Railroad.
While walking through town, we took a shortcut, found ourselves in Harmony Mall, and stopped to look at an exhibit of impressive historical photographs. This led us into a tourist shop where copies of the same photos were for sale, and we got a history lecture from the clerk in the shop. The mall was built by Byron Harmon in 1903, housing several family-run businesses. He was also the first photographer in the area, and spent his life photographing the scenery, the native Indians, and the first tourists. His son, Don Harmon, and granddaughter Carol Harmon continued both the business and the photography, and photos by all three people, spanning eight decades, were on display. The business is still family owned, and is very much worth a stop for anyone in the area.
8/12 American tourists in Canada occasionally get jolted into the realization that they really are in a foreign country. Yesterday, Helen and I were walking along a street in Banff in front of a parking lot with coin-operated parking ticket machines. A woman approached us and said in a rapid Canadian accent "Can you give me two loonies for a toonie?" As it turns out, we were able, between us, to find two loonies (the Canadian one dollar coin, which has a large picture of a common loon on one side) for a toonie (the Canadian two-dollar coin). Incidentally, last summer, a friend in Newfoundland explained to us that the toonie is really called "Queen Elizabeth with a bare backside". The coin has a portrait of the Queen on one side, and a picture of a bear on the other side.
This afternoon, we rented a bike for Helen (my bike has traveled with us), and rode a blacktop trail to Sundance Canyon. Then we parked the bikes and walked a loop trail up the canyon, along a pretty little stream which cascades down limestone cliffs in multiple waterfalls.
8/13 Moraine Lake and Consolation Lake are high mountain glacier-fed lakes near Lake Louise. Lake Louise claims to be the highest settlement in Canada, at 5100 feet (not very high by United States standards - but very high for this latitude of 52 degrees) From there, the road continues upward to Moraine Lake, at 6200 feet. We climbed another 300 feet on the trail to Consolation Lake. Both lakes have ice fields and small glaciers visible on the surrounding mountain slopes. Streams are still flowing vigorously, fed steadily all summer by glacial meltwater. Behind Consolation Lake, we can see a glacier high up on the mountain, flowing down and terminating abruptly at a cliff edge that looks like a vertical drop of around 1000 feet. Several small waterfalls flow out from under the ice and drop almost vertically down the entire face.
We thought that Moraine Lake would be a less-crowded alternative to Lake Louise. But we were stopped in a long traffic jam at least half a mile before we got to the parking lot, and then crept at a snail's pace through the lot, looking for a place to park. The Overlook trail, a short but steep climb right from the parking lot, was incredibly crowded, mostly by busloads of Japanese tourists. But the view was worth the jostling crowds. The lake is the typical turquoise-green of glacial lakes, and is completely surrounded by high mountains dotted with icefields. (Incidentally, the view from this vantage point is on the back of the Canadian $20 bill).
The crowd thinned out somewhat when we headed up the 4-mile (round trip) trail to Consolation Lake. But there were still plenty of people. This lake is smaller and the mountain cliffs crowd close, spilling talus slopes right into the lake. We had to clamber over a rockfall of giant boulders to get to the water's edge. While sitting there, we heard a rockfall which lasted several minutes, somewhere up on the mountainside, hidden in an upper canyon. A cloud of dust was visible, but the moving rock never got out to where we could see it (a good thing - we felt slightly vulnerable sitting at the base of the talus slope.)
8/14 Most of the day was spent seeing the sights along the TCH (Trans Canada Highway), west from Lake Louise. We walked around Emerald Lake, looked up at the Burgess Shale formations high on the mountainside (the source of many important fossils), then stopped along the highway to marvel at the spiral railroad tunnels in the mountains just past the continental divide. At two different points, the tracks disappear into the mountain, then exit almost directly above the entrance, built as the only way to gain or lose elevation in this narrow canyon without requiring too steep a grade. The trains are often long enough so that one can simultaneously see the back end of the train hanging out of the lower level and the front end coming out the top, further up the mountain. Later, we walked to Takakkaw Falls - one of the more spectacular of the many waterfalls we've seen in the past few months.
8/15 We finally drove to Lake Louise, arriving in mid-morning to beat the crowds and have a chance of finding a parking place. As Ron Hoffmeister said, you almost have to stand in line just to see the lake. This is Canada's second-most-visited tourist attraction, exceeded only by Niagara Falls.
I carried our big canoe to the lakeshore in front of the gigantic hotel, threading through gawking crowds who were standing around chattering in a multitude of languages. We paddled to the far end of the lake, through pale, opaque, water, milky with glacial silt. We left the canoe at the trailhead and hiked to the Plain of Six Glaciers, about a five-mile round trip (and an elevation gain of 1218 feet) from the end of the lake. A rustic stone and timber teahouse sits near the end. It was built originally as an alpine hut to shelter climbers. Shortly after this area was opened to tourists by the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway line, the CPR built a hotel and brought in Swiss mountaineering guides to assist guests in climbing the many challenging mountain peaks. The guides insisted on the hut, at the base of the mountains, as a resting-place between the long approach hike and the difficult mountaineering. Now the place serves tea and pastries to a horde of tourists. All the supplies are brought up the trail by packhorse. There's no electricity or running water. The baking is all done at the hut. The employees hike in, work a five-day week, then hike back out for a shower and a couple of days off.
The Plain of Six Glaciers, at the end of the trail, is one of the more spectacular places in Banff. The last portion of the trail climbs along the top of a high moraine, directly above an old, mud-covered glacier. There is so much debris on top of the ice that the only way we could be sure it really was ice is that there were frequent open crevasses, extending down into cleaner blue-white ice. A large glacier flows down a valley directly opposite us, and other glaciers are visible high up on the mountainsides, each with a fringe of tiny waterfalls cascading down the cliffs from the base of the ice.
8/18 Hiked Stewart Canyon. While standing on the long wooden footbridge across the canyon, we heard footsteps, and turned to see a young bighorn sheep approaching us on the bridge. It stopped about 10 feet from us, looking nervously at the narrow passage. We stood motionless, and the sheep finally decided to continue, almost brushing us as it passed. I had to stifle the urge to reach out and pet it as it passed.
8/19 This morning, we packed up and moved about 100 miles northwest, to Rampart Creek Campground, still in Banff National Park (Banff is a big place!). This puts us near several interesting hiking opportunities, and about 20 miles south of the Columbia Icefield. The campground has no hookups, and not even a dump station, but has large wooded sites. When we arrived, around noon, the campground was perhaps half full, so we had plenty of sites to choose from. We chose the most scenic rather than the easiest-to-access site, of course - a site directly on the North Saskatchewan River among towering spruce trees, with a view of a high mountain to the south. The site was a long pull-through with a spacious clearing in the middle, but with narrow entrances between trees and sharp curves at each end. We spent half an hour jockeying back and forth, trying to bend the long trailer around the short curves, finally succeeding by backing in. In theory, anything we can get into we can also get out of. We'll put that theory to the test in a few days.
8/20 It's turned cold. This morning when I got up, the thermometer read 37 degrees F. Is this autumn, or just a passing bubble of arctic air? The sky is brilliant blue, and by midday the temperature was up to 60, so it's wonderful hiking and sightseeing weather.
We spent the day at the Columbia Icefields. Initially, we wandered through the Visitor's Center, absorbing the cold facts of geology and human history of the area. In the late afternoon, we took a Snocoach ride out onto the Athabasca Glacier. These vehicles are almost as interesting as the glacier - comfortable, large-windowed bus bodies mounted high above six monster wheels. The tires appear similar to those found on giant earth-moving equipment, and all six are powered. It effortlessly descended (and later ascended) a 32% grade to get down the giant lateral moraine, through a small lake of meltwater, across a bumpy ice-core moraine, and out across the bumpy ice to the center of the one kilometer wide glacier. The "road" across the ice is regularly graded and smoothed, but is still very bumpy, since the ice is moving constantly. Where we stop, we are told the ice is 1000 feet thick. There are occasional almost round holes, extending hundreds of feet down. These are called "mills", caused by meltwater swirling as it descends through a small crevasse. We wandered around on the ice for about 20 minutes, in an area certified free of open crevasses.
About 20 people per day park along the edge of this glacier on the access road and climb one of the nearby mountain peaks - partly on rock and partly on the upper portions of one of the several visible glaciers. Above us, barely visible, is the 325-square-mile Columbia Icefield - a dome-shaped structure on a high plateau from which tongues of slowly flowing ice are squeezed out over the edges to flow down and become the dozen or so glaciers around the edges. I've just finished reading a glacier field guide. The last few chapters explain the techniques and equipment necessary to hike up a glacier and the rescue techniques for getting your friends out of the hidden crevasses they fall into. I've decided to content myself with the Snocoach ride over the lower mile or two of ice.
On the way back home, we stopped to do the short hike to Panther and Bridal Veil Falls.
8/21 A cloudy day, with occasional very light rain, but threatening more. We chose to do our sightseeing from the shelter of the truck, and took a long drive, exploring east on highway 11 along the Saskatchewan River valley. It's beautiful and empty country. After driving along the 30-mile length of Abraham Lake, we stopped at the visitor's center for the dam. This is one of the more recent hydro projects, built in 1965. As with most of the dams we've visited, the justification was primarily for flood control, and power generation was just a fringe benefit. In this case, the river flows through Edmonton AB, and before the dam, ranged from devastating spring floods to not enough drinking water in late summer. The resulting large lake behind the dam has very little recreational development, since most of it is in government-owned protected reserves. Like many hydroelectric installations, it generates power only during peak usage periods - which in this area is a couple of hours in early morning, and then again in late afternoon. Hydro generators, unlike thermal-electric power plants, can be turned on and off with a minute's notice, without losing efficiency, and there's not enough stored water to run them continuously anyway.
8/22 Hiked the Bow Lake Trail - an interesting variety of terrain. The first part of the trail is along the shore of Bow Lake. Then the trail winds through the delta of silt and small rocks where the creek enters the lake. Eventually, the trail reaches a cliff, and climbs steeply, gaining about 300 feet of elevation beside a series of interesting waterfalls which had carved down so deeply into the rock that we could rarely see the water. Then, abruptly, we're standing on a terminal moraine looking down into a hanging valley, still stark and bare, crisscrossed with moraines, from glaciers that retreated only about 100 years ago. Straight ahead to the west, we can see the source of the Bow River - a spectacular waterfall cascading down at least 1000 feet of cliff face, draining from Bow Glacier, barely visible on the cliffs high above. To the left is a remnant of another glacier, huddling at the head of the valley it had scoured before retreating.
Later in the afternoon, we hiked up to Peyto Lake Viewpoint and from there on up to the Bow Summit Loop, both providing spectacular views of the glacial lakes and surrounding mountains. This is one of the few places in the Canadian Rockies where one can reach the timberline and the beginning of a true alpine plant zone with an easy hike, since the Icefields Parkway climbs to around 6500 feet at Bow Pass, and the access road to the parking lot climbs a little more. The average yearly temperature up here is 27 degrees F. Snow can fall any day of the year, and the growing season is less than 60 days.
8/23 Time to move on. We packed up early and headed north to Jasper. (Given the cool temperatures, heading north may not be smart.) Arriving about noon, we found ourselves in the inevitable long line to get into the Whistlers Campground - the only one of the Jasper N. P. campgrounds with full hookups (but only 77 of the 800 sites have full hookups; another 100 or so have electricity only). The line moved efficiently, and only took about 15 minutes. We asked for hookups. The lady in the booth looked dubious, said they were rarely available, searched her chart, and then announced that we were the lucky recipients of the only one left. Funny - that's what they told us at Banff too. Is this what they tell everyone, or are we really lucky? Anyway, it's a nice site. These sites are all 80' long pullthroughs, in a mature pine forest. The lodgepole pines need lots of light. They drop their lower branches, and also shade out all but the most successful trees, leaving a very open grassy forest floor.
The whole area is swarming with Wapiti (called Elk in the US). As I write this, there is a female wapiti and a still-spotted fawn grazing in our campsite, about 15' from the trailer. Others are laying in the tall grass across the road - all I can see are pairs of long ears sticking up out of the grass, twitching occasionally. We have to be careful where we step as we walk around the trailer.
8/26 We've spent the last few days sightseeing - both driving around in the truck and hiking to the many off-road destinations. There's a lot to do here - it's a very large park. So far we've hiked to lower Sunwapta Falls (don't miss this one); Athabasca Falls (very short walks near the road); Bow Lake and Bow Glacier; Angel Glacier (the trail is a loop going to the glacier along the top of the lateral moraine left as Angel Glacier retreated less than 100 year ago, and returning along the outflow creek along the bottom of the glacial, still barren, valley). Angel Glacier is spectacular, with spreading wings high up on the steep face of Mt. Edith Cavell. At the base of the cliffs, another section of the glacier abuts Cavell Lake, a melt pond with tiny icebergs which calve from the glacier and float downwind across the lake.
We also drove east along highway 16 (The Trans-Canada Highway), out of the park and to Hinton, to see what a non-tourist town in the North Country looks like. Along the way, we saw groups of bighorn sheep grazing along the roadside.
Hinton is a small strip town along the highway, but it looks prosperous. It even has a Wal-Mart! This area is only 20 miles or so from the edge of Jasper, but it's already out of the big mountains and in gently rolling foothills. From just west of Hinton, we headed up Highway 40 to Switzer Provincial Park. This is a pleasant park, perhaps 20 miles in extent, surrounding a group of little lakes. The several primitive campgrounds in the park were mostly empty. We hadn't heard any recent news broadcasts and were surprised when we found ourselves stopped at an RCMP roadblock. Another natural gas well had been bombed, this one only about 20 miles north of the provincial park. Apparently we didn't look like suspects, so we were given a description of the suspects and asked to inform the RCMP if we saw them. (Next day, we heard that four suspects had been arrested). On the way back into the park, we were stopped in a traffic jam for half an hour. A crazy driver, passing at high speed in a no passing zone, had hit a motorcycle head-on. The motorcyclist was dead, of course. We stared at pieces of motorcycle and camping gear scattered over an acre or so of road and shoulder, while one lane of traffic was allowed to creep slowly past the site on the far shoulder.
The town of Jasper is yet another tourist town, not as crowded or fancy as Banff. Even downtown, the sidewalks have occasional piles of Wapiti droppings, and we saw them grazing in the grassy median strip of the main street.
One evening, we had dinner at Tonquin Prime Rib, which appeared to be the best steakhouse in town. The meal overall was well prepared and well presented, but reinforced our view that Canadians still don't understand beef. My T-bone steak was tough and gristly. Helen's prime rib was also on the tough side. We ordered an expensive bottle of Canadian wine, still hoping to find drinkable local wine. It was pleasant, but not memorable - I could get better Australian wines for half the price. We keep hearing rumors that good wine is being made in British Columbia, but we haven't found it.
The weather has been cool (40 night, 55 to 70 days), partly cloudy, occasional localized rain showers. It's starting to feel like autumn, so we're hurrying to see the sights before snow flies.
Getting Email turns out to be easy, once we found the right place. We were sent on a wild goose chase by the Jasper Chamber of Commerce. The library has an Internet-connected pc, for which they charge $5.00/hour, but they couldn't, or wouldn't, provide a bare phone line. The hotels I checked did not have phones or modular plugs in the lobbies and didn't seem interested in offering their desk phone. I eventually found the Soft Rock Internet Café - a coffeehouse with half a dozen on-line pc's, for which they charge $2.00 per 10 minutes of use. They were happy to unplug a pc and let me plug my laptop into that phone line, for the same charge.
Interesting vignette in Jasper: a graying European couple, he in a suit and tie, she in silver high heels (in a tourist town where everyone else is wearing gaudy T-shirts, shorts, and sandals). They are standing on the sidewalk in the middle of town gawking, as another couple arrived on a pair of Harley Davidsons, - both typical bikers, big bellies encased in black leather with silver spangles on a warm day, he with long hair and a full beard, she about 200 pounds and bleached blond.
Time to move on. Our next report will be from the Vancouver area.