At the end of last year I took photos of a play Carol Cadby and her Yorktown HS teenagers put on called "The Girls that Glow". Written by a former student of hers, it was about the early days of phosphorescent hands and numbers on clocks. They used a radioactive radium-based material to produce the glowing in the dark effect. The girls who made the watch faces got very sick. This play was in my mind all morning, as I drove north up Highway 93 to Radium Hot Springs. I wondered if some of the radium came from here?   A gruesome thought in this place of great natural beauty.

It is also here that the Highway turns East and plunges into the mountains, tracking the Kootenay to its source on the border between BC and Alberta . The Kootenay valley in this part of Canada is kind of cool, as it is also the origin of the Columbia River, which flows North from a place called Castle Flats. Just a few miles south of Castle Flats, the Kootenay rushes out of the mountains and South down the same valley, all the way to Montana. It then turns West into Idaho, goes over some spectacular rapids, and turns North again into Canada to join the Columbia at Castlegar.

From Radium Hot Springs on, I entered the Canadian National Park system, and with it, tourism.   The number of RVs of all sizes multiplied rapidly. Number plates from all over North America began to appear. English stopped being the lingua franca.   The highway remained a magnificent motorcycling challenge, never going straight for more than a mile or two, climbing through mountains and over rivers in a continuous striving for awesome vistas.  Soon after it crosses into Alberta, Highway 93 becomes the Icefields Parkway, running North from Route 1 to the town of Jasper. I used a lot of time taking photos as I drove up the highway with hundreds of other tourists. I was thinking this would be the most 'scenic' part of the trip. We shall see.