O Canada! Where pines and maples grow

Great prairies spread and lordly rivers flow,
How dear to us thy broad domain,
From East to Western sea!
in banff , we hiked out onto the columbia ice field, which is a giant monster of a glacier , and is over 10,000 years old.there are signs every 200 yards or so marking how big the glacier used to be, in 1977, in 1997. in the past ten years more than half of the glacier has melted away.
they expect that all the land glaciers will be gone by 2030.
this change isn't just some ice melting away. as we learned on fliers posted everywhere, the slow melt off of the glaciers feed almost every river on the continent. from the columbia icefield, the melt off goes to both the pacific and the atlantic via multiple rivers and lakes.
and suddenly they will be gone! and what will we do then? it is a crazy shift to try and understand.
the lakes in banff get this spectacular color from minerals in the glacier runoff.



banff on canada day. oh canada!

montana is the home of glacier park, the usa's (and canada's) worst and meanest mosquitos, and some epic prairie land.
a moose!


the weeping wall.



our home on the range.

it took us about 10 hours to cross montana.