Page 4C
EAT, DRINK & EXPLORE
East Oregonian
Saturday, August 19, 2017
Canadian Rockies: From rugged hikes to upscale resorts
By ADAM KEALOHA
CAUSEY
Associated Press
CANMORE, Alberta —
Canada’s stretch of the Rocky
Mountains is an outdoor
paradise with something for
everyone: upscale resorts
surrounded by jagged moun-
tains, isolated hikes offering
an escape from urban life and
crystal-blue water that dares
you to feel the chill.
The mountains straddle
the border of British
Columbia and Alberta, with
two of its best-known desti-
nations, Banff National Park
and Lake Louise, in Alberta.
My family and I flew into
Calgary, rented cars and spent
a week exploring the wonders
around Banff, setting up base
camp in Canmore, about 60
miles west of Calgary. Our
accommodations were at
the midway point between
luxury and roughing it.
Cabins at Banff Gate Moun-
tain Resort have a full kitchen
and electricity, but no air
conditioning. That worked
fine on summer nights when
temperatures dipped into
the 50s F. Late afternoon
sun beating in got the cabins
toasty. That’s not a problem,
though, in a place where
there’s plenty to do besides
sit indoors.
Here are some highlights:
Join the throngs
at Lake Louise
Banff is the most popular
of the area’s cluster of
national parks — which
also includes Jasper, Yoho
and Kootenay — and
Banff’s crown jewel is the
glacial-fed Lake Louise.
The lake is exquisite,
as evidenced by selfies
snapped along its shoreline
walking paths, capturing
smiling
families
with
snow-covered mountains in
the background. If being on
the water is your preferred
way to experience the lake,
canoe rentals are available
through Fairmont Chateau
Lake Louise, a decidedly
more chic hotel than where
we stayed.
AP Photo/Adam Kealoha Causey
In this July 6 photo, a bridge crosses a stream along the Iceline Trail in Yoho National Park in Canada’s stretch
of the Rocky Mountains, straddling the border of British Columbia and Alberta. It is an outdoorsman’s paradise
with scenic mountain hikes and crystal-blue water.
AP Photo/Adam Kealoha Causey
AP Photo/Adam Kealoha Causey
In this July 6 photo, the Yoho River flows through
Yoho National Park in Canada’s stretch of the Rocky
Mountains.
In this July 6 photo, water tumbles 1,246 feet at Taka-
kkaw Falls in Yoho National Park in Canada’s stretch of
the Rocky Mountains.
If crowds aren’t your
thing, plan to get to Lake
Louise as early as possible.
Crowds are likely to be
bigger than usual this year,
because admission to Cana-
We didn’t venture that way
until noon, and parking lots
were packed.
da’s national parks is free in
observance of the nation’s
150th birthday.
Hear the roar the falls
For a more rugged expe-
rience, we left the masses
of Banff behind, bound for
Takakkaw Falls in Yoho.
Heading west into British
Columbia (and the Pacific
time zone) you pick up an
hour, so that may have helped
us beat the crowd a bit, too.
Even before we got out
of the parking lot — about a
half-mile from the falls — we
could hear their mighty roar.
Tumbling from 1,246 feet,
the 60-degree F air took on a
chill as mist filled the air.
A refreshing start to the
day preceded what eventually
became a 12-mile round-trip
hike. From Takakkaw we
took the Iceline Trail, which
included views of the Yoho
and Little Yoho rivers and
Laughing Falls.
Take in the sights
from the Bow River
Not everyone in our crew
enjoys a hike, but we do all
like the water.
Sections of the Canadian
Rockies include whitewater,
but we decided to go for a
smoother ride with Canmore
River Adventures. The six of
us joined another family of
three on a wide raft paddled
by a guide.
At one point we stopped
and were told to touch a finger
or toe to the water if we dared.
I did, but I didn’t keep my
hand in for long — the guide
said the river’s temperature
was about 40 degrees F and
wouldn’t get any warmer.
Our one-hour float down
the beautiful Bow River
included sightings of an elk
that had swum to an island to
munch on grass and — just
before we exited the boat— a
bald eagle that dove into the
water and came up clasping a
fish. It was a fitting end to a
spectacular trip.
Seasons
If you can’t get there
this summer, the weather
remains relatively mild into
September, when larch and
aspen trees turn gold as fall
arrives. And there’s always
winter skiing: The slopes
typically open in November.
SCIENCE: ‘It’s ironic that we’ve learned most ECLIPSES: Mythologies
about the sun when its disk is hidden from view’ surrounding total solar
eclipses still exist today
Continued from 1C
Penn is chief scientist for a National
Science Foundation-funded movie
project nicknamed Citizen CATE.
More than 200 volunteers have been
trained and given special small tele-
scopes and tripods to observe the sun
at 68 locations in the exact same way.
The thousands of images from the
citizen-scientists will be combined for
a movie of the usually hard-to-see sun’s
edge.
Mike Conley, a Salem, Oregon,
stock trader whose back yard is studded
with telescopes, jumped at the chance
to be part of the science team.
“Who knows? Maybe a great secret
will come of this, the mysteries of the
sun will be revealed, because we’re
doing something that’s never been done
before and we’re getting data that’s
never been seen before,” he said. “A
big discovery will come and everybody
will say, ‘Hey, we were part of that!’”
You don’t need to have telescopes to
help out. You can use the iNaturalist app
via the California Academy of Sciences
and note the reaction of animals and
plants around you. You can go to a zoo,
like the Nashville Zoo, where they are
asking people to keep track of what the
animals are doing. The University of
California, Berkeley, is seeking photos
and video for its Eclipse Megamovie
2017, hoping to get more than 1,000
volunteers.
Even with all the high-tech, high-
flying instruments now available,
when it comes to understanding much
of the sun’s mysteries, nothing beats
an eclipse, said Williams College’s
Pasachoff. That’s because the sun is so
bright that even satellites and special
probes can’t gaze straight at the sun just
to glimpse the outer crown, or corona.
Satellites create artificial eclipses to
blot out the sun, but they can’t do it as
well as the moon, he said.
The corona is what astronomers
really focus on during an eclipse. It’s
the sun’s outer atmosphere where
space weather originates, where jutting
loops of red glowing plasma lash out
and where the magnetic field shows
fluctuations. The temperature in the
outer atmosphere is more than 1 million
degrees hotter than it is on the surface
of the sun and scientists want to figure
out why.
“It’s ironic that we’ve learned most
about the sun when its disk is hidden
from view,” said Fred “Mr. Eclipse “
Espenak, a retired NASA astronomer
who specialized in eclipses for the
space agency.
And they learn other things, too.
Continued from 1C
AP Photo/Pat Eaton-Robb
In this Aug. 9 photo, an 8-foot balloon carrying a camera rises into the
sky during a test launch at the University of Hartford in West Hartford,
Conn. A team from the University of Bridgeport and the University of
Hartford conducted the test as part a project that will send cameras into
the stratosphere to photograph the solar eclipse Monday.
Helium — the second most abundant
element in the universe — wasn’t
discovered on Earth until its chemical
spectrum was spotted during an eclipse
in 1868, Espenak said.
But that discovery is eclipsed by
what an eclipse did for Albert Einstein
and physics.
Einstein was a little known scientist
in 1915 when he proposed his general
theory of relativity, a milestone in
physics that says what we perceive as
the force of gravity is actually from the
curvature of space and time. It explains
the motion of planets, black holes
and the bending of light from distant
galaxies.
Einstein couldn’t prove it but said
one way to do so was to show that light
from a distant star bends during an
eclipse. During a 1919 eclipse, Arthur
Eddington observed the right amount
of bending, something that couldn’t
be done without the moon’s shadow
eclipsing the sun.
“It marked a complete change in
the understanding of the universe,”
said Mark Littmann of the University
of Tennessee, a former planetarium
director. “Bang. Right there.”
pots and pans.
Perhaps the most
creative version of this
strand of mythologies
comes from certain
branches of Hindu
culture. In that version,
the mortal Rahu is said to
have attempted to attain
immortality. The sun and
moon told the god Visnu
of Rahu’s transgression.
As punishment, Visnu
decapitated Rahu.
Ever since, Rahu has
sought to exact vengeance
on the sun and the moon
by pursuing them across
the sky to eat them. Once
in a while — at the time
of an eclipse — Rahu
actually catches the sun or
the moon. In the case of a
solar eclipse, Rahu slowly
devours the sun, and it
gradually disappears into
Rahu’s throat – only to
reappear from his severed
neck.
In other branches of
Hindu culture, the “sun
eater” took the more
traditional form of a
dragon. To fight this beast,
certain Hindu sects in India
immersed themselves up
to the neck in water in an
act of worship, believing
that the adulation would aid
the sun in fighting off the
dragon.
Other cultures had
equally ingenious
explanations for — and
defenses against — a total
solar eclipse. Eskimos
thought an eclipse meant
that the sun and moon
had become temporarily
diseased. In response,
they’d cover up everything
of importance —
themselves included — lest
they be infected by the
“diseased” rays of the
eclipsed sun.
For the Ojibwe tribe of
the Great Lakes, the onset
of total eclipse represented
an extinguished sun.
To prevent permanent
darkness, they proceeded
to fire flaming arrows at the
darkened sun in an attempt
to rekindle it.
Amidst the plethora
of the myths and legends
and interpretations of this
strange event, there are
seeds of understanding
about their true nature.
For example, the famed
total solar eclipse of May
28, 585 B.C., occurred
in the middle of a battle
between the Medes and
the Lydians in what is now
the northeast region of
modern-day Turkey. The
eclipse actually ended the
conflict on the spot, with
both sides interpreting
the event as a sign of the
displeasure from the gods.
But based on the writings
of the ancient Greek
historian Heroditus, it’s
thought that the great Greek
philosopher-mathematician
Thales of Miletus had,
coincidentally, predicted its
occurrence.
Chinese, Alexandrian
and Babylonian
astronomers were also said
to be sophisticated enough
to not only understand the
true nature of solar eclipses,
but also to roughly predict
when the “dragon” would
come to devour the sun. (As
with much knowledge back
then, however, astronomical
and astrological findings
were relayed only to the
ruling elites, while myths
and legends continued
to percolate among the
general population.)
Advances in modern
astronomy have given
us detailed explanations
for solar eclipses, to the
extent that their time and
location can be predicted
centuries into the future
and reconstructed from
centuries ago.
Of course, mythologies
surrounding total solar
eclipses still exist today.
Some conspiracy theorists
say this year’s eclipse
will cause the end of the
world – perhaps a testament
to the endurance of the
superstitious side of the
human psyche.