The Athabaska Glacier, flowing out of the Columbia Icefields in Jasper National Park, Alberta
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My experience travelling to the Rocky Mountains in the summer of 1965 made me impatient with life on the relatively flat lands of the Midwest. In 1967, when it looked like Uncle Sam was going to draft everybody with at least one arm and leg and a body temperature of 72 degrees or higher, I enlisted in the Air Force and went off to see the world. After basic training and tech school and a 20-month stay in Dover, Delaware, I got transferred overseas - to Canada. I arrived on Vancouver Island the day before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and found a place very different from the East Coast. For openers, there were very few people - the city I lived in had a population of 7,000 and the nearest bigger place, Nanaimo, was 70 miles to the south along the only highway. I had views all around of glaciers and salt water full of salmon and orcas, plus fresh water with cutthroat and rainbow trout. Instead of only imagining the huge continental glaciers that covered the midwest, I was able to get up close and personal with their (MUCH smaller) younger cousins.
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Mount Andromeda and the outwash plain of the Athabaska Glacier. The lateral moraine is visible at the far end of the valley.

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