Messages from the Pale Blue Dot

Cycling Jasper to Banff: Three perfect cycling days

(This is a ride that I did from 18-20 June 2009 and have just been too busy to get it up online)

There are few places on earth as perfect for cycling than the route from Jasper to Banff, south through the Jasper National Park into the Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada. On three days, from 19-20 June 2009, Ellis Grossnickle and I rode the distance, with help from our friend Phil Ramey, who accompanied us in Ellis’ truck.

Here are some photos from the adventure:

This trip had its inception in a conversation that I had with Aaron Cosbey, an Albertan and a colleague of mine from IISD in Winnipeg, who I had asked if he might recommend a good place to go cycling near Calgary. I was planning to be in Winnipeg for the IISD Board meetings and meetings of several of the IISD teams through 16 June and was looking for a chance to explore some of the adjacent province and ride in the Canadian Rockies. Aaron suggested riding from Jasper to just outside of Calgary and I spent a few days trying to figure out exactly how to do this without support.

I mentioned the trip to Joe Barton, who said that he would be interested in doing the trip. Our original plan was to meet up in Calgary, rent a car one way to Jasper, dropping off supplies and clean cycling clothes in Lake Louise. We would spend the first night with our vehicle about 100 km south of Jasper and, the next day, drive to Jasper to drop off the car and begin our trip back to where we spent the first night. The idea would have been to have Fedex or DHL boxes at the overnight locations and we would express our clothes home, picking up the clothes we had left “pre-positioned” on our trip north.

However, as we discussed this on Facebook, Ellis read about our plans and asked if he could come along. He was planning to be in the area with his truck and thought we might be able to share the driving and riding between the three of us. The idea of having a support vehicle, particularly in June when the weather could suddenly turn wintry, seemed like the good idea.

All was proceeding smoothly until about three weeks ago when Joe fell while descending Lincoln Gap in Vermont, separating his shoulder. Joe had to cancel but Ellis’ friend Phil volunteered to ride his motorcycle to Calgary and serve as our SAG driver for the trip.

On Wednesday, 17 June 2009, I flew in from Winnipeg and we met at the Calgary Airport, stashed my bike box at the Sheraton Four-Points outside of town, bought up some beer and drove to the Columbia Icefields Parkway Chalets to spend the first night.

DAY ONE – JASPER TO GLACIER

Early Thursday morning we left our belongings in the Chalets and drove with our bikes to Jasper for breakfast. Using our mobile phones, we went war-driving down the main street and parked at the Whistler Inn, which had a strong wi-fi signal. The waitress got us the online password and the three of us set up our laptops, checking stock prices, accessing mail and chatting with colleagues. We had to get three things filled-up… gas tank, stomachs and Internet. By 9:30 we were on the road, Ellis and I on our bikes and Phil driving the truck leap-frogging us as we headed up toward the Athabasca Glacier.

This is the first day’s map.

Unfortunately, Garmin only released at the end of the week the firmware upgrade that fixed their problems with corrupted TCX files. I had been having problems with my Edge 705 for the last month, losing ride data from some wonderful routes. It was very frustrating to find at the end of both Thursday and Friday’s rides that all of the heart rate, elevation, wattage and speed data from those days had been lost. However, after updating the firmware while i Lake Louise on Friday night, the 705 worked perfectly on Saturday. Not much to do now.

The route from Jasper to the Columbia Icefields is about 100 km and rises from just less than 1000 meters to just above 2000 meters in a rolling up and down route the mostly works upwards. After a lovely breakfast in Jasper we rode throughout the day, arriving in the mid-afternoon.

This is the shot looking west towards the Athabasca Glacier. Ellis took this shot from the parking lot of the Icefields Chalet as I was cresting the climb.

DAY TWO – GLACIER TO NORTH OF LAKE LOUISE

 

This is a shot of the Icefields Chalets, a great place to stay if you are cycling this route. We ran into a number of other cyclists who were doing the same route.

On day two of riding, we started after 9:00 am, following a nice breakfast and rode up to about 2200 meters before the big descent.

This is the view, looking south from the descent just south of the Athabasca Glacier. Most of the road was similar to this. As you can see from the day’s profile the day was a big descent, a gradual downhill and then some serious climbing later in the day.

By around 3:30 in the afternoon, the weather had closed in and the rain began. Since we had the vehicle, we decided that it might make more sense to head to the Post Hotel in Lake Louise and then drive back to this location (about 20 km north of our final day’s destination) the next day.

Here is Ellis packing it in for the day as the rain was beginning to fall.

 

Heading south into Lake Louise in the rain.

It was a good decision, as the rain began falling with some intensity as we drove for about twenty minutes to our lodging and a round of drinks by the fire in the hotel pub.

DAY THREE – NORTH OF LAKE LOUISE TO BANFF

True to our word, we loaded up the truck early on Saturday morning and back-tracked to the exact point where we had abandoned our ride on Friday afternoon when the rain hit. And, because the gods abhor hubris (and we were very proud to have traded the rain for what we thought was going to be a lovely Saturday morning) the rains started again as we drove north. In fact, we laughed when I made the comment in the truck when the rain was a light mist that, “at least we don't have a heavy rain” and suddenly the rain started falling in sheets. Very eerie.

Never underestimate the value of good intelligence. As we were getting ready for the day’s ride in the lobby of the Post Hotel, I had overheard the desk clerk speaking about the road that ran parallel to the main highway. I was sure that we would be stuck riding on the shoulder of Highway 1 with four lanes of RVs and huge trucks. However, when I spoke with the desk clerk he showed us the way to get on Bow Valley Parkway, which runs parallel to the main road and is, undoubtedly, one of the world’s best bicycling routes!

And, so, the yellow line is where we rode, starting back north of the Post Hotel in Lake Louise and Bow Valley Parkway runs along, but not too near, the highway.

After downloading the firmware update for the Garmin Edge 705, it finally started working correctly on day three of this magnificent ride. Obviously they fixed the corrupted tcx file issue (and the unit has worked flawlessly over the last two weeks since this ride.) Here is the GarminConnect.com link for the day’s ride: http://connect.garmin.com/activity/7353968 

 

Someday, Garminconnect.com will actually finish the incorporation of the best features from Motionbased.com into their site and offer the ability to insert HTML code into blogs (one of the best motionbased.com features before they were acquired by Garmin.) But, for the time being, here is a shot of their main page. The elevation profile for the day says it all. The ride was a long, slow, gradual descent along the Bow River.

Ellis took this as I was posing with my bear whistle, which I had only blown one time for real when I had seen the black bear the day before. No bears on Day Three, although there was a grey wolf lurking by the road that Ellis spotted.

Lots of other cyclists on the road doing what must have been a lovely long climb up to Lake Louise.

Day Three was simply the most beautiful day of riding that I have had in many years. The rain cleared within the first half an hour and the day was sunny, 15 degrees and mostly all downhill for three hours of easy cycling. After two days of long climbs and many hours in the saddle, it was the perfect ride for the last day. I now understand why everyone had said that the best way to ride this route was to go from Jasper to Banff. It was not for the winds, which mostly blew from our westerly quarter, but the first day’s climb was nice and gradual, the middle day’s ascent was manageable, but the last day was pure cycling heaven.

As the Bow Valley Parkway ended, intersecting the main highway just about five kilometers north of Banff, we decided to end the ride with the memory of cycling down Bow Valley rather than semi-trailers blowing past us at 120 km/hr for the last little stretch. So, we loaded up the bikes in the truck and headed into Banff for beers and lunch at Earle’s.

Ending in Banff as a good choice and much better than my original idea of riding all the way into Calgary. That would have been a lousy extra 100 km and added four hours or more onto the ride on the shoulder of a busy highway.

We checked into the Four Points Sheraton and Ellis and Phil went off to pick up Phil’s motorcycle in town. Adventure complete and I flew home, leaving the guys to their truck/motorcycle trip through the Rockies.

Helping Communicate the Periphery As It Becomes Central to the Debate

Director’s Cut - Friday, 5 June 2009

Originally published as part of a series of articles appearing in our publication Linkages Update at http://www.iisd.ca/whats_new/directors_cut130.html

Helping Communicate the Periphery As It Becomes Central to the Debate

By Kimo Goree, Director of IISD Reporting Services (IISD RS) - kimo@iisd.org

This week in Bonn, during the Climate Change Talks, IISD Reporting Services team members can be found not only in the negotiating rooms, but also taking notes and photos at a number of key side events. Each morning, side-by-side with the Earth Negotiations Bulletin at the documents counter, you can find copies of our “companion” publication at this meeting, ENB on the Side.

From 1996-1997, during the negotiations of the Kyoto Protocol under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the nature of the climate change meetings began to evolve. The annual gatherings called the Conference of the Parties, the negotiations of the Berlin Mandate and the meetings of the UNFCCC subsidiary bodies began to grow in both size and importance, with many participants coming not to participate in the negotiations but only to attend the growing number of side events held concurrently with the official meeting.  It was my feeling that the side events provided an increasingly fertile arena for the development of new ideas, many of which eventually fed into the main negotiations. In addition, many of the side events provided information on the activities of specialized agencies, governments and non-governmental organizations involved in new research and implementation. The organizers of these side events invested considerable resources to assemble experts for fascinating presentations that sometimes were, unfortunately, sparsely attended. In 1998, at the UNFCCC COP held in Buenos Aires, in an attempt to capture the rich content of these side events and communicate the ideas exchanged during them to our larger, internet-based audience, IISD began publishing a separate report each day on the side events. 

As a result of our success, in 1999 IISD Reporting Services developed a new product called “ENB on the Side,” to be distributed side-by-side with the Earth Negotiations Bulletin and to report on side events at meetings covered by the ENB. This publication was supported by the UNFCCC Secretariat at meetings of the UNFCCC from 1999-2005 and in 2002 the UN Development Programme (UNDP) provided funding for our coverage of the two final preparatory meetings in New York and Bali for the World Summit on Sustainable Development and at the Johannesburg Summit later that year.

In March 2006, IISD Reporting Services published ENBOTS from the Eighth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, held in Curitiba, Brazil. Then, in 2006 and 2007, with financial assistance from UNDP, IISD published ENBOTS from CSD 14 and CSD 15 in New York.

Now, after more than ten years publishing ENB on the Side from key meetings, our archives contain a rich history of ideas that were first discussed publically in side events and eventually were mainstreamed into the negotiations. If you do a text search for “REDD” (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries), you will find references to REDD in side events covered by IISD Reporting Services far before the concept reached the official UNFCCC negotiations. Many other discussions of funds, emerging issues, institutional initiatives and trends that we now consider to be central in the climate policy debate were first presented in meetings captured by our reports. Our coverage is often the only record of these side events and we would hope that the ideas that germinated on the margins of the negotiations were promoted through our coverage and distribution to tens of thousands of readers, projecting the ideas far beyond the handful of participants in each side event room.

IISD owes the success of ENB on the Side to both the UNFCCC Secretariat, who funded our coverage of climate change side events for many years, and to UNDP, who has partnered with us to provide coverage during the World Summit for Sustainable Development meetings and two sessions of the Commission on Sustainable Development, and now, more recently, in the preparations for the Copenhagen climate change talks. We are very proud that both the UNFCCC Secretariat and UNDP have joined to support our activities “on the side” here in Bonn at this round of negotiations.

Be sure to visit our ENB on the Side coverage of the current climate change talks in Bonn: http://www.iisd.ca/climate/sb30/enbots/. During this crucial round of negotiations, ideas that emerge in the side events will no doubt find their way into the solutions being negotiated as delegates prepare for the final debates in Copenhagen this December. For certain, the record of these events will show how vital the discussions on the margin are to the long-term health of the climate policy ecosystem.

Working to Reverse the Knowledge Flow OUT of Africa

Director’s Cut - Thursday, 14 May 2009

Originally published as part of a series of articles appearing in our publication Linkages Update at http://www.iisd.ca/whats_new/directors_cut129.html

Working to Reverse the Knowledge Flow OUT of Africa

By Kimo Goree, Director of IISD Reporting Services (IISD RS) - kimo@iisd.org

The Earth Negotiations Bulletin has, for almost two decades, assisted policymakers by not only synthesizing the outcome of international policy negotiations but also by communicating the outcome of these meetings to decision-makers worldwide. While the policymakers who attend these meetings enjoy the benefits of our daily reports as they work, the larger audience for our summaries is following the decision-making process from offices in multilateral development banks, regional economic commissions, international development agencies, and development and foreign ministries, primarily in developed countries. These readers rely on the information we provide to assist them in tracking the policies and priorities governments have set, and in making decisions based on those policies regarding how financial resources should be allocated. The multilateral assistance system is all about resource flows; redirecting and directing flows, halting flows, increasing flows and the decisions on where, when and how much should reach different initiatives are based on the policy decisions that we communicate on a daily basis.

In conversations with our readers, we identified a gap that was articulated by individuals working as decision-makers in these international organizations and by regional policy-makers, particularly in Africa. Most of the problems encountered in both environment and sustainable development activities were not international, but were local and regional in nature. The cultures, traditions and approaches of each region shape not only the problems, but also the solutions, as identified by those working at the ground level. At the same time, international meetings identifying international solutions were the focus of most communication sources. Although regional policy-makers often met to discuss and agree on regional solutions to regional problems, the outcomes of these meetings were not being successfully communicated to the international audience. Our readers asked us if we could begin attending and reporting from more regional meetings.

In 2006, IISD Reporting Services approached the Government of South Africa Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism (DEAT) with a proposal to begin providing coverage of regional meetings in Africa as part of a program of support for the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). We felt that the outcomes of meetings such as the African Ministers Council on Environment (AMCEN), the African Ministers’ Council on Water (AMCOW), the African Ministers’ Council on Science and Technology (AMCOST) and other regional meetings on issues such as biodiversity, climate change and desertification were not being communicated out of the region. For decades, the development and environmental policies in Africa had been set in a one-way flow from major developed country capitals into the region, without substantial input from regional policymakers on their regional policies and priorities.

The Government of South Africa was very receptive to our proposal and suggested that we should also create a network for the exchange of policy information on sustainable development between regional policymakers in Africa. In addition, they suggested that IISD should write non-prescriptive policy briefs before major upcoming meetings to assist regional governments in their preparations. In 2007, the South African Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism signed a US$190,000 agreement with IISD to begin work on IISD’s African Regional Coverage Project, with the agreement that IISD would begin fundraising for the second and third year funding for this project. In 2008, funding from Germany’s Ministry for Development Cooperation (BMZ) and Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) completed the project’s funding for the first three years, through the end of 2009.

During the last three years, this project has reported from over 24 intergovernmental meetings, including: the UN General Assembly High-Level Meeting on Africa’s Development Needs; Africa Carbon Forum; First Inter-ministerial Conference on Health and Environment in Africa; African Ministerial Conference on the Environment; African Water Week; African Committee on Sustainable Development; African Ministers’ Council on Water; and the African Ministerial Council on Science and Technology. The project has also published Briefing Notes to highlight the outcomes of several African Union Summits, as well as meetings of the UN-Human Settlements Programme and the MDG Africa Steering Group. In June 2008, as part of this project, South Africa’s Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Marthinus van Schalkwyk launched the booklet “Environment and Decision Making in Africa: 2006-2008, which documents the history of environmental decision making related to climate change, water, biodiversity, and desertification.

As a result of the success of IISD Reporting Services’ African Regional Coverage, we have begun plans to expand our regional coverage into two areas. In early 2009, an agreement was signed between IISD and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). Plans are currently underway to replicate this project in Asia and the Pacific, in partnership with the UN Environment Program Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, based in Bangkok. We are currently making plans to begin fundraising with governments in Latin America and Asia and the Pacific in order to expand our coverage of regional meetings.