Highway Right of Way

My friends Chris and Connie from Calgary traveled out to Nordegg to spend a recent weekend with us.  On Saturday we took a drive up into the high country of Banff National Park.  It was a pleasant surprise to learn that the expiry date of my National Park Pass had been extended by four months.  This was because the parks were closed for four months during the first wave of the Covid outbreak.

We drove up to the Big Bend arena, near the north park boundary, and hiked a stretch of the old highway right of way.  I had been here briefly back in June with my friend Rob.  Right beside the current highway, the North Saskatchewan River drops into a cleft in the rock and disappears.  At that point there is an old concrete bridge, dated 1938, that crosses the highway.  We followed the old roadway for about half an hour.  It passed a spot where a tributary to the North Saskatchewan cascaded down in cliff in a rather nice waterfall.  We came to a second concrete bridge after about a kilometer or so, and it traversed the North Saskatchewan River as it exited that same extensive cleft in the rock.  This bridge was dated 1939.  A short distance further we can to a third bridge, also dated 1939.  This one was spanning Nigel Creek, just upstream of where it meets the North Saskatchewan.

It was rather cold [about +5C] when we first set out, and was heavily overcast, with a stiff breeze and some snow coming down.  By the time we hiked in to the bridges the skies had begun to break open and the temperature warmed nicely.  We explored for a while, photographing the bridges and the waterfall, before eventually hiking back out.