While we were visiting Jon's family, we took a walk to a "town" that has historically accurate displays in the buildings--a milliner's shop, a cobbler, a schoolhouse, a jail--and as you go through the town, the time period changes so that you end at a 1920's carnival with five or six games. This is Roger showing off. He got the little slider to the He-Man distinction, which was about 3/4 of the way up.

They had a neat old steam engine and genuine old passenger cars--how uncomfortable for a long trip!--with the bunks overhead that folded down. Jon's kids wanted to wave at the engineers as the train went by, so Jon hoisted his sons onto his shoulders (they're 2 and 4) and Roger gave Jon's second oldest daughter a lift. (She developed a one-day crush on Roger at this point.)

Look at the striations on this mountain--horizontal on one side and vertical on the other. What on earth caused that?



The lakes in Banff and Jasper were all amazing shades of blue-green.

Shadows on the mountains...

This is one of the bigger waterfalls we saw in the mountains.

We climbed down to the river half a mile or so down the road from where this was taken. It was an attempt at panning for gold. On the riverbank there were signs of a recent bear visit--broken and chewed branches of a berry bush.

These were the clouds that ushered us out of Jasper...



Some of the mountains are just covered in green...

and others are pretty bare...

See where all the snow drains when it melts?




More interesting striations... (This was taken from Jasper, another Canadian national park.)

While we were eating lunch at the only restaurant at Long Beach, there was this guy sitting out on the rock just below, either reading or witing. We think reading, because writing would have been very difficult with the breeze.




What he could see from that rock...

What remains after a forest fire as viewed from Highway 5.




Burned trees, closer....