Where did July go? It's now August 1 and that marks the twenty-eighth day of this trip. We've accomplished the goal of getting to Alaska and returning, with everyone doing at least one full traversal of the entire Alaska Highway.

Marty and I rode together today. Clif, Charlie, and Tom camped outside of Grande Prairie and left this morning before we were ready. They didn't want to come back into town and we figured that we'd meet up later anyway.

We started out on Rt. 40 and quickly left the "grand prairie" and headed into the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. The weather was excellent as was the road for the first half of the trip. There were expansive vistas of spruce forest (largely owned by paper companies judging by the number of their signs and cautions about logging trucks). We stopped for lunch in Grande Cache and had one of the better lunches of the trip. Grande Cache was named after a large shipment of furs cached nearby by the Hudson Bay Company in 1821. There is a large coal mine and power plant just outside of town. Then it was on through some minor construction and a narrower, bumpy road to Jasper National Park.

We paid our entrance fee and headed into the park. We needed a break and stopped at the Pocahontas Cabins and Restaurant. There we ran into Clif & Co. who are camped in the Pocahontas Campgrounds. We all headed off together for Jasper where Marty and I had booked a room at the Tonquin Inn. On the way, we saw an extremely large elk with huge antlers. For whatever reason, we didn't stop for a picture. I expect to see more elk on my traversal through the park tomorrow. We then saw the sheep pictured below. They were hard to ignore as they kept going back and forth across the road, blocking traffic. There is a good deal of fire damage that wasn't here the last time I visited and some smoke is clouding the view a bit.

This was my final day traveling with the group. I have essentially voted myself off the island and will leave it to the four "survivors" to carry on. Sometimes I think I would have been voted off first anyway if we were really playing the game. ;-)
I need to get home to take care of business and our new home purchase. I had never planned to be gone as long as the itinerary called for. Five weeks seemed like enough and that was before these other activities came up. Jane and I had been to Jasper, Lake Louise, and Banff several years ago so this seemed like the logical place to cut my visit short and head for home. I do plan to do much of the same route that Charlie laid out but ahead of the rest of the group.

The guys treated me to a "riding away" dinner at the restaurant adjoining our motel. The meal was one of the best I've had on the trip (lamb for me, prime rib for everyone else). We said our goodbyes and I'll probably be off down the Icefields Parkway before they come to get Marty for breakfast. It's very bittersweet to end this part of the journey - I've enjoyed the companionship, the humor, exploring new places together, even some of the confusion, and knowing that good folks were there to experience this with me. Of course, without Clif there wouldn't have even been a trip like this for me to go on. At the same time, there's a certain freedom to having the road and the schedule to yourself. We had started to ride in smaller groups, with Tom and I racing ahead, Clif and Marty setting a slower pace, and Charlie riding alone or with one of us.