Today was a good day

I'm in Hungry Horse (seriously), Montana and it's midnight. I've eaten a big wedge of Huckleberry pie and I don't think I will be able to keep my eyes open so this will be short :)

Canmore had been a reminder of what civilisation is like, folks from Calgary seem to go there for weekends living out their mountain adventures. There was a Starbucks, mobile phones were everywhere.

The day got off to an inauspicious start when I got up late and could hear the steady rushing noise of heavy rain outside. I decided I would go as far as I could in the conditions and when I'd had enough, I would stop for the night.

I headed towards Calgary on the Trans Canada highway, but as I'd been there before and Canmore was as close to a big city as I wanted to get, I decided to turn south a few dozen miles before the highway reached Calgary. It turned out to be the best decision I've made so far. The map shows the area as blank - that's because it is. The prairies of Central Canada meet the Rockies in rolling hills of grassland, almost all of which seems to be given over to cattle ranching. Each ranch is vast, and far from being flat and featureless cattle pastures, the cattle look completely lost in the immense landscape. Folds in the earth hide rivers, and looking down the road - which sometimes runs off to a vanishing point on the horizon - you can see the weather you'll run into in an hour or so. All the while the Rockies form a sheer wall on the western horizon, stretching away north and south as far as the eye can see.

I wondered if this was a reflection of the land that greeted the first white settlers.

I was chilled from the rain and the windblasting, so I stopped in a small town aptly named Longview and had a bowl of soup to warm up. The cafe had a small notice board which advertised fencing, bulls and horses. While I ate a chap walked in wearing a stetson and spurs on his boots, a real cowboy, the first I've seen.

Lunch may have lifted my spirits, but what really helped was the blue sky that greeted me as I left Longview. The landscape flattened out after sixty or so miles of nothing but ranches in the wilderness, and as the road converged with the mountains the wind went past nasty and became ridiculous. As I cut south across the last of the prairies toward Waterton Lakes National Park I had the bike permanently at a 30 degree angle just to keep in a straight line.

Waterton itself was ok, but not much more impressive than the grassland I'd passed through. I bade farewell to Canada and crossed into the USA for the last time, almost immediately entering Glacier National Park. The spectacular majesty of the place is overwhelming. Snow layered peaks, glaciated valleys, hidden lakes revealed by turns in the road, shafts of sunlight part the ominous clouds to dramatic effect.

I climbed Logan Pass and that was one of the highlights of the trip for me so far. After crossing the Rockies, passing through tunnels cut in the sides of the mountains, the road dropped into a fantasy landscape that could have come from Narnia. Ribbons of water cascaded down sheer cliffs, clear blue streams burbled over red rocks, deer ran in dark forests.

If you've not been there yet, rent a car and go. Remember to thank me later.

After leaving Glacier the road led me to Hungry Horse, which has many Huckleberry products and not much else. It was hard to leave Canada, the scenery was great but it's the friendly Canadians I will miss. However I like Montana so far, and I'm heading to Yellowstone National Park which I've been looking forward to.

Bed calls, will post up some pictures soon.

Fraser.