Across Canada by Thumb

 Banff Springs Hotel.

 Cascade Mountain.

 Kathy on top of Sulphur Mountain.

 A surprise visit as we sat on top.

 Me on Sulphur Mountain.

 Paddling on Lake Louise.

 Hitch hiking to Jasper NP.

 In the tent at Athabaska River in Jasper.

 Over the Athabaska River.

 Maligne Canyon.

 On Okanagan Lake in the interior of BC.

 Wow, look at the hair!

Kathy in our tent on Long Beach on the west side of Vancouver Island.

The summer of 1973, after the completion of grade 12.

Like many young people of my generation, my girlfriend, Kathy, and I decided to take a trip to western Canada. We booked a train to Calgary and left as soon as school ended. We sat in seats from Toronto to Sudbury where our train combined with another train coming from Montreal. This train had our sleeping compartment. We traveled comfortably through Northern Ontario, around Lake Superior and across the Prairie Provinces. We arrived in Calgary, Alberta three days later. We found a campsite beside the Bow River and the Dinosaur Park. Our adventure had begun.

The rest of the trip was accomplished by using our thumbs. We hitchhiked from Calgary to Banff, up the TransCanada Highway to Lake Louise, the Columbia Ice Fields, Yoho NP and to Jasper. We camped, hiked various trails and canoed on Lake Louise. We were always on the lookout for bears, but fortunately saw none on hikes but only a couple along the roads through the national parks. We also saw mule deer, a mountain goat, mountain sheep and a moose. We loved the mountains and the alpine terrain. Then we hitchhiked south again back to Banff before crossing the border into British Columbia at Golden and then onto Revelstoke.

We continued on to Kamloops and then south through the Okanagan Valley to Kelowna. From there we continued west through the Fraser River Canyon to Vancouver.

We took the ferry across the strait to Victoria. We loved the city and spent some time there before hitchhiking north to Nanaimo. Then we traveled to the west coast of Vancouver Island and the Pacific Rim National Park. We spent a week here camping for free among the huge driftwood logs on the beach. Although the water was bone chilling cold we still waded and swam a bit. We spent a day in Tofino too at the western end of the TransCanada Highway.

Having reached the Pacific coast we needed to turn around and return to Toronto. Again we hitchhiked back retracing some of our route. We got a ride from a woman and her two children that took us from Banff back up to Jasper and then into Alberta and on to Edmonton. We camped with them for two nights before reaching Edmonton. On through the prairies via Saskatoon and on to Winnipeg.

Hitchhiking back then was considered safe by the hitchhikers and the drivers. It was not unusual to see other people at a highway on ramp. It was a good cheap way to travel and you often met interesting people. Sometimes you had to wait for a long time to get a ride, but generally we didn't have too much trouble, probably because Kathy was a pretty girl and people were more inclined to pick up a guy and a girl than two guys. There was one place, Wawa, Ontario, that was infamous as a place where people got stranded, sometimes for days. This was because there was a prison not too far away and people were reluctant to pick up anyone in the vacinity for fear that they might be an escapee. We were dropped off not far from Wawa, but luckily managed to get another ride.

We arrived home just before the start of the next school year.