Two Ducks in Bear Country

September 20, 2012

We’re now officially on our way back west. We’re in BC again, and our clocks are set to Pacific Time again (actually, we never changed to Mountain Time). Today we left Banff and headed west on the Trans Canada Highway. This route took us through Yoho National Park, where we hiked around Emerald Lake, and to the Spiral Tunnels, where we waited for a train for about 15min without any luck. The next part of our trip was through Glacier National Park and across the Rogers Pass. Our guidebook describes this part of the TCH as the most beautiful, and we can’t disagree. We did not take that many photos since the air was very misty and visibility of the spectacular mountains around us was limited at best.

Emerald Lake

We arrived relatively early in Revelstoke, BC, where we are staying for tonight. Revelstoke is a cute town with a very typical street layout: There’s the harbor, the train station and the only shops and restaurants are on main street. We walked from our hotel “downtown” and had a look around, striking up conversations with every second shop-owner. Dinner was at a place called “Village Idiot”, which was packed when we left. While Revelstoke seems pretty dull as a tourist destination, I suspect that changes as soon as the cold season arrives and all those high-end outdoor equipment shops start making sense. We heard a lot about the great slopes on Mount Revelstoke, where it can take an experienced snowboarder a full hour just to make it back down. Needless to say, there is not much snow-related activity at the moment, it was still 28 degrees at 4pm today.

Revelstoke, BC, looking over the Columbia River

Tomorrow we’ll be heading on towards Vernon, over the route via Nakusp, so a lot of driving again.

September 19, 2012

Today we didn’t go anywhere, but just stayed in Banff. We did a short hike through the woods near the city centre, and afterwards we strolled through the various outdoor shops on main street, but that’s about it. We had some fast-food on the way and I finally got my much wanted five-dollar-milkshake.

Hiking the Fenland Trail in Banff, AB

Today we’ll be driving through Yoho National Park and stay in Revelstoke, BC. After that, we already booked a room in the wine country of British Columbia, can’t wait ;)

Enjoy the photos. The post is a little late since the Internet was unusable when we went to sleep last night.

Impressions from Banff

September 18, 2012

Today we did not see that much, but we had a great day nevertheless. We started with breakfast at the same place we had dinner the night before, that was a first. Then we drove up to Lake Louise, which was just a 5-minute drive from the hostel we were staying at. Although it was still cold (10am) and the lake was still in the shades, there were already dozens of tourists running around, trying to snap a shot of the scenery with their iPads extended at arms length.

Lake Louise and the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise

As usual at these tourist hotspots, you only have to pass the 100m radius to have some space to yourself. The same was true of Lake Louise, and after a few more hundreds of meters we saw even fewer people along the shoreline. Either way, we were going to hike up to the Plain of Six Glaciers, a 14km trail through the valley feeding Lake Louise with meltwater from the numerous glaciers. With every kilometer we saw fewer people, and the hike (and the weather) was really enjoyable. What was different to the hikes we had done before was that this one did not go through any dense forest, nor did it repeatedly dip behind ridges. That meant we had a straight line of view back towards Lake Louise at any point of the hike to assess our progress, which was really encouraging.

On our way towards the Plain of Six Glaciers

At the teahouse on the trail (where most people stopped, and most of them also returned) we pushed on for the last stretch. Soon we crossed the treeline, and the trail got a little bit more demanding after that. The very final stretch was barren rock, and we had to search for the actual trail a few times. About 300m before the dead end we talked to a hiker coming back down and he warned of us the ridge we were about to cross (heavy winds and steep drops on both sides). So we finished a mere 100m from the furthest point we could have hiked, not too shabby.

The view along the trail

The views along the route were spectacular, and it was interesting to get this close to actual glaciers. On the way up we heard and saw multiple avalanches coming down the mountain ahead of us, which sounded like canon fire from the distance. Very impressive. In terms of wildlife it was just chipmunks, squirrels and other similar rodents, although we saw dozens of signs warning about Grizzly mothers with cubs.

Lake Louise, back down at ground level

After Lake Louise we drove up to Moraine Lake for a quick visit. The lake was equally beautiful, but by now we were too tired (and a little sunburnt) to do more than to look at it. As we had booked a room in Banff, we left the Lake Louise area on the Bow Valley Parkway (now 1A, formerly TCH), and saw very few other cars. We drove the 55km to Banff through beautiful fir and birch forests at sunset. In Banff we only strolled down main street once, but we’ll have plenty of time to see more tomorrow.

September 17, 2012

Let’s try to keep it short today, I had two pints of beer after all.

We left Jasper after a short breakfast stop at Tim Horton’s this morning. Our destination was Lake Louise, where we are currently staying in a very nice hostel. To get from Jasper to Lake Louise (and Banff for that matter), you have to drive down the Icefield Parkway, one of the most beautiful roads through the Canadian Rockies, and by itself probably the main attraction of Jasper and Banff National Parks. The road the Edith Cavell Glacier was closed though, so we didn’t take the old 93A.

Athabasca Falls

I’ll just let the photos speak for themselves. Our first stop was at the Athabasca Falls, a major tourist destination. The Falls are fed from the Athabasca Glacier, which is part of the Columbia Icefield. The glacier itself was our second stop. We drove down to a parking lot where we could hike up to the current edge of the glacier. There are so-called “snowcoaches” which drive onto the glacier, for a hefty price, completely unnecessary in our opinion. The glacier landscape was simply impressive, the scale as well as the views.

A mere kilometer after the glacier, we stopped at a parking lot and went for a 5.2km 3-hour hike up the mountain opposing the Athabasca Glacier. This hiked was advertised as giving a better view of the Athabasca and adjoining glaciers, and it didn’t disappoint. It should be noted that the hike was a little bit steep in some places, which is usually not a problem for us, but which was much more noticeable since the top was at 2.350m (total elevation for the hike was about 250m). The views we got were spectacular, and we even got a glimpse of some mountain sheep from the distance. It was a new experience for us to hike at elevations like these, and to cross the tree-line by foot.

Hiking to get a better view of Athabasca Glacier

After we finished our hike for the day we were already running kinda late, and the hour we were still missing from crossing the timezone wasn’t helping. We pushed on towards Lake Louise and only stopped once for a small picknick along a river and finally at Bow Summit, the highest pass on the Icefield Parkway (2088m), for the sheer mind-boggingly beautiful view across Lake Peyote.

Lake Peyote

Tomorrow we’ll head on to Banff, where we already booked two nights in advance, but not before doing a nice warm-up hike near Lake Louise. For those of you who still hate us: The weather was shirts-and-shorts again today, even above 2000m ;)

September 16, 2012

Mount Robson

If I had to sum up the day today by a single word, it would probably be “lakes”. We started early at Valemount, after breakfast in our “own” kitchen. We quickly made it across the border from British Columbia into Alberta (and into another timezone). One of the many spectacular views along the route was Mount Robson, the second tallest mountain in BC. I was driving today, so Katrin experimented with taking shots with the X100 from the passenger seat.

Soon we entered Jasper National Park. The scenery got more beautiful with every passing kilometer, and it didn’t take long before we entered the pretty little town of Jasper. We only stopped for a short break before taking the road towards Maligne Lake. Now, what you have to imagine is a simple paved road, winding through sheer endless dense forests, with a new view behind every bend and elevation, and with every car going to the same destination as yourself (since the road is a dead end). This, combined with a 60km/h speedlimit and the very likely sighting of wildlife makes for some interesting driving ;)

Medicine Lake

Lake Maligne was as beautiful as you’d imagine it to be (the canyon with the same name wasn’t). We hiked the short 2.5km Moose Trail which runs alongs the Lake shore for the last few hundred meters. As usual, the weather was perfect, sunny but not to warm, blue skies all day long. After Maligne, we took the road back to Jasper and only stopped twice, once at Medicine Lake, where we had lunch and saw a moose cow swim across the lake. We had also seen some big-horn sheep earlier, but still no bears.

Lake Annette

Before we checked into our room for the night, we decided to spend some time at Lake Annette, a few kilometers from the town center. We found a quiet and warm spot on a wooden pier and just sat there for a while, feet in the water. Our room tonight is in a very lovely guest-house in one of Jaspers neighbourhood streets. Jasper itself is really cute: It’s small, it’s clean and it has lots of outdoor stores which are surprisingly well stocked, considering the remoteness of this place. We had pizza in town, and one of the local beers (with a glacier on the label). Tomorrow well head south, destination: Lake Louise.

Dinner ;)

Lots of photos today, enjoy! (And leave comments ;)