Tilleys & Trams (08.06.09)

We made it to Jasper!!!

Ohmygoodness, it’s breathtakingly beautiful here! I had so many “lower my blood pressure moments,” you know, where just looking at something beautiful brings you that sense of peace & tranquility and everything in your world just kind of evaporates, the feeling the producers of those old Calgon bubble bath commercials were trying to portray (“Calgon, take me away”). My soul is smiling tonight. :-)

The picture above is Pyramid Lake, with Pyramid Mountain in the background. The boats belong to Pyramid Lake Resort. Later, we would walk around Pyramid Island. I’m starting to notice a Pyramid theme…

I think the best way to describe today is to show you pictures. We started in town, shopping for groceries & a new hat for me. When we were in Rainier I decided I wanted a waterproof hat. The gal at Coast Mountain Sports in Richmond introduced us to the Tilley hat, an expensive piece of hat craftsmanship, and the 1st hat that I ever tried on & liked instantly. We bought one today.

OK. Let me explain this picture! We were up at the Jasper Tramway, & the best shot of Pyramid Mountain from the base station is by the men’s room. I’m not just loitering there.

We were going to ride the tram today, but there was an hour and a half wait, so we bought tickets for tomorrow at 9:27.  Thankfully, we found out later that the forecast is a big yellow sun for tomorrow morning, not the clouds we had this morning. But as you can see, today’s clouds turned into beautiful blue sky with the occasional fluffy whites.

So we decided to go to Pyramid Lake today. OK. I have to climb up on my soapbox for a moment. There are two ways to Pyramid Lake – you can hike there or you can drive there. The trail pretty much parallels the road. Now I can understand how the locals or the seasonal workers may not have transportation and would want to walk there, but for me, the point of hiking is to go somewhere you can’t drive to. Why take the time hiking there when you can hike somewhere else? Why would this be in the hiking books? So, we drove. And it was breathtaking!

The footbridge to Pyramid Island on Pyramid Lake with Pyramid Mountain way in the background.

At the end of Pyramid Island is a beautiful view of Pyramid Mountain.
  Uh, these are some other mountains with Pyramid Lake in the foreground. There are so many amazing peaks here, I don’t know how anybody knows the names of all of them!

We plan to get up early tomorrow for sunrise (!) back at Pyramid Lake. We want to see the morning light on the western mountains, and there’s always the chance that we might see a mouse… Then it’s up to the Jasper Tram. In the afternoon, who knows?

But first, a couple of parting PhotoScapes…

Miscellaneous shots from the base of the Jasper Tramway today. Tomorrow, we’ll have shots from the top!

  We can’t shoot sunsets, necessarily, but we can shoot alpenglow from our resort property! Lower right is Mt Edith Cavell, lower left is the tramway’s Upper Station.