Japser – Jonas Campground – Saskatchewan Crossing – Mosquito Creek – Lake Louise – Canmore: 338 km

My bike is fixed. The wound on my forehead is slowly healing. My wrist is getting less swollen and the bruise on my leg is turning from grown to green to yellow. Cycling is forgiving and the pain fades when my muscles warm up, even in this cold. Marijn and I are in Jasper, smack in the middle of the Canadian Rocky Mountains. We’ve hitchhiked here over the past two days and have already seen the natural beauty around us, and we can’t wait to cycle in the midst of it. With food packed for four days we set off onto the famous Highland Parkway. 

We cycle trough the most insane mountain ranges, their rocks stick out distinctively sharply high into the sky. Where the pine forests stop, the white of the snow and the ice merge into the low hanging clouds on the hard contrast of the black rocks. Behind them the sky changes colours in all spectrums of blue. We’re perpetually accompanied by the relentless sound of melting, falling and streaming water, creating powerful waterfalls that run into rivers that merge into bigger and more powerful ones, flowing in and out of the many lakes. Their water is an emerald green, ever so inviting, ever so cold. The scenery is framed in these thick, heavy, dark green forests of pine trees, their trunks close enough to one another that we can’t see into it for more than a couple of metres. We see deer, moose, bears, elk and coyotes, sometimes too close for comfort, yet always exciting to encounter. Every day we climb, sleep long ascends over glacier passes, followed up with thrilling downhills. My heart skips a beat whenever I have the time to think about what we’re actually doing. We pass the Columbia Icefields that are more ice than fields. This is everything that I imagined Canada to look like. It’s a cliché that really exists. I’m glad Marijn took me here, for this was not my plan at all.

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As we make our way through Jasper National Park, we sleep on some of the many campgrounds next to the road. When they’re too far away we camp on lookout points, providing us with the most incredible morning views when we wake up. We get what we’ve coined ‘bear fear’. The fear of bears at night. Everybody here warns us for about them, and when the warnings are not vocally transmitted, they’re in the form of signs: “YOU’RE IN BEAR COUNTRY. BEWARE!” We cook and eat far away from where we sleep, we store our food (and everything else that has a smell) even further. On more than one occasion Marijn needs to tear himself away from the warm comfort of his sleeping bag into the midnight frost because he forgot a banana or a sandwich in his bag that is now next to him in his tent. I hear him cursing in the dark. We carry the bear spray with us always. Yet, at night, the sounds of the forest pricks up our ears. Could that be a hungry bear, in search of some food? Every now and then we can hear the other unzip their tent and shine their flashlight into the trees. Always false alarm.

We build a fire every night, partly because it’s fun, but mostly out of necessity. It freezes at night, and we have shoes to dry. We eat sandwiches with peanut butter for breakfast and lunch, combined with trail mix and fruit. We have our red tuna pasta each night. Along the road to Lake Louise we find a cabin and enjoy a real mattress and a real kitchen. Although we still eat our red tuna pasta. In Lake Louise we sneak into an actually paid campground that was supposedly full. Due to the forecasted rain most people haven’t shown and we easily find a spot to set up camp. The rain doesn’t come and we share beer, biscuits and stories with our neighbours over the fire. They advise us not to drink the water straight out of the lakes and the rivers. You’ll get sick because the melting ice carries with it all the feces that the wildlife left over winter. They call it beaver fever. Luckily, we’ve been using the water filter.

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Sometimes the cold gets me exhausted. Sometimes the solitude does too. Why did we leave Europe again, where the weather is perfect and there’s a town every other hour? But then I look up at a random mountain, where eagles circle waterfalls far above me and I know why we left. We left just to be here, to experience exactly this and to see what’s right here, right now, in front of us.

Banff was our original end point to our national-park-loop, but we’ve found a Warm Showers host in Canmore. The last 30 kilometres there are horrifying. We follow a single track made for serious mountain bikers. We, and our heavily loaded touring bikes, are not happy. But we eventually arrive at Toivo’s place. His wonderful house overlooks the mountains and I understand that there’s no TV with views like these. He immediately invites, almost insists, us to stay a day or two more to wait out the rain. We happily agree.