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Hamann journal: Parking a town in a national parkNovember 24, 1999 EDITOR'S NOTE: Seattle-based correspondent Jack Hamann is headed on another adventure, this one to just to the south of the Arctic Circle. He'll be driving through the Canadian Rockies, across the windswept northern plains, up the Inside Passage and along the northernmost section of the Alaska Highway. Follow along here for regular dispatches on his journey. By Jack Hamann and Leslie Hamann
Journal date: November 20
(CNN) -- There' s a certain feel to fancy ski towns. Fur-lined Gore-Tex vests, high-heeled black leather boots on icy sidewalks, wraparound mirrored sunglasses perched on brightly-sunburned cheeks. As a general rule, the more money in town, the more entertaining the show. It's possible that Banff, in southwest Alberta, Canada, grows more outrageous as the snows grow deeper. But on this sunny late November day -- when the snow cover is still unseasonably thin -- it seems refreshingly free of pretense. Like Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Park City, Utah, and Aspen, Colorado, Banff has its share of fancy shops and expensive restaurants. But they are the exception.
Six blocks of immaculate storefronts are concentrated along the main drag (although, comically, the trendier places seem to be on the west side of the street, leaving the poor merchants on the east side of Banff Avenue all but begging the crowds to come on over.) While there is a Ralph Lauren clothing store and a Hard Rock Cafe, most of the businesses seem to be smaller-time operations. Many of those operations are Asian. During the 1980s, an estimated one-third of the commercial property in Banff was owned by Japanese interests. There are some fabulous-looking Japanese restaurants in town, as well as a serious smattering of Korean, Chinese and Indian. Word is, however, that the sagging economies of Japan and the rest of Asia have severely cut back on the number of travelers from across the Pacific. Banff is the largest urban area within a national park (Banff National Park) anywhere in the world. In the battle between people and wilderness, the town is pretty close to ground zero. Where should the sewage go? How many homes are enough? What to do with all those cars and their monoxide-spewing engines? Can the animals handle the light and noise? Can humans handle it? More than anything, we were struck by how normal the folks in Banff seemed. They were young and old (well, there were plenty of twentysomethings), slackers and slick yuppies, soccer moms and guys not trying to impress anyone. It might be another phenomenon of off-season travel ... perhaps Banff turns into Vail when the really big snows come. But then, where would all those rich people buy their bad-looking clothes? Maybe Banff is for the rest of us after all...
Better lucky than goodJournal date: November 21 (CNN) -- We don't mean to sleep until 8 a.m. every morning. But, at 7:30, it's still dark. And because we're headed hundreds of miles further north, mornings will only grow darker. Yet, if this were summer, today's mind-blowing scenery would never have happened. We didn't plan it. In fact, we feared this might be one of our bleakest days of weather. After all, we're high in the Canadian Rockies, just a couple weeks from the start of winter. As usual, it's better to be lucky than good. It had snowed overnight. By 8:15, the sun emerged from the southwest (more south than west), igniting the tips of the Rockies with sunlight that looked like fire. Cue the trumpets. This was gonna be good. Emerald Lake, darned beautiful, was dammed in the last ice age by a giant moraine of gravel and boulders. Ringed by an amphitheater of soaring mountains, the lake is brimming with frigid water from melted snow. As we set out to walk the 3-mile ring around the lake, the water was a steel cold mirror, reflecting what had now become a pale blue morning sky. Fresh snow has a way of erasing smells and muffling sounds. We were startled by the sweet, familiar scent of cedar in air that otherwise smelled nothing but cold. The crunch of our boots overwhelmed the otherwise complete quiet. When we stopped crunching to absorb killer view after killer view, we were hit with competing urges: should we hold our breath, creating a suffocating silence? Or should we blow away the stillness with a deafening scream -Ð with enough echo to start avalanches and awaken sleeping animals? It was tempting, but we wanted to see animals. Our walk around the water was only Act I in a day filled with bright blue skies, stunning landscapes and amazing solitude. Along the lake, we saw only two other sets of fresh footprints, but never saw or heard the intruders on what had become "our" lake. Later in the day, as we drove the 130-mile length of the extraordinary Icefields Parkway connecting Banff and Jasper National Parks, we'd go what seemed like forever without seeing another soul. All to ourselves, we had scenery that tourists crammed in their summertime RVs only read about in their travel brochures. Pure joy, no parades. Fittingly, a full moon ended our day, rising triumphantly above the crest of the Rockies ringing the town of Jasper. We're told that, in another hundred thousand years or so, the next in a series of Ice Ages will wipe out Emerald Lake and rearrange the glaciers along the Parkway. Glad to have seen them at very their best before they're gone.Jack Hamann is a correspondent with CNN's Environmental Unit and CNN NewsStand.
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