Canadian Rockies

Day 1 (Sunday)

We fly into Calgary on Saturday, rent our gray Ford Taurus and drive 1.5 hours to Banff which is a cozy and interesting little town. We walk a bit, check out the restaurants, get campsite reservations and then start looking for our hotel, The Juniper which turns out to be just outside town proper. Once we've lugged our stuff up, we see our beautiful hotel room and wow, we have our own personal view of Mt Rundle.



The next day, we wake up soon after sunrise (helped by the 2 hour time diff.) and take some shots of the mountain. Then, we pack up and get ready for my first 2-night backpacking trip. We leave the car at Sunshine Village Ski resort parking and start off our 12 km hike to our Egypt Lake campsite. I'm surprised at the snow on the edge of the trail, I didn't know we were going to be backpacking in such cold conditions. Luckily, it's an easy trail to follow and counting down km's is so much more fun than counting down longer miles. We start at about 5440 ft elevation (higher than Mt Marcy's peak!). Along the way, we stop at a nice creek and see some great views at the clearings.




But, the best part of the whole hike was beholding the vistas at Healy Pass at 7700 ft. Wide open views of snow-capped mountains, alpine lakes and larch trees with bright orange leaves, what more could you ask for?

Oh, I know, a grizzly bear! Almost every party we met while hiking up to Healy Pass warned us about the grizzly bear up there, so we were excited and a little apprehensive about seeing and photographing it. But unfortunately, we missed it. :-( The last party who saw it said it was on its way down the valley, away from the trail. Oh well...




We start hiking down the other side of the pass towards our campsite, which is about 5 km away. Along the way, we meet a guy hiking alone, walking with an aluminum cookpot in his hand, he told us that he'd seen the grizzly the day before. About 3 minutes after meeting him, we learned what the cookpot was for, because he had started banging it, warning the grizzly that he was coming, hehehe.

That's Egypt Lake viewed from the top of Healy Pass, so about 4 km more to go.


We meet a park warden while we're filling up our water bags at a creek. She's surprised that we have a tent, sleeping mats and sleeping bags in our small packs, and we've enough to be warm for the night. She was right to be concerned though, it was about 32 degrees that night, literally freezing. We were the only tent at the campsite (it was a fall weekday after all) and there were a couple of people at the little shelter. I bet they had a warmer night than we did, since they had a stove in there... jealous, jealous me...

Being bear country and all, we had to cook and eat at a picnic area away from our campsites. We even had to hang up all our food and trash so we'd be safe from bears. The solitude and views made for a great campsite.

Day 2 (Monday)

After a cold and fidgety night, I declare that I don't want to spent another cold night at that tent site, I suggest that we camp at the lower campsite that we'd seen instead. We figured that nobody would mind since we had reservations for 2 nights and that if that campsite was full, we could still hike all the way out.

So, we go on a day hike that morning to see Egypt Lake itself and a few other lakes in the area. Unfortunately, we couldn't figure out how to get to Mummy Lake (the trail signs were confusing) and since we didn't bring lunch and needed to hike down to the lower campsite that day, we had to give up and go back to camp. We did see a few nice places:




After lunch, we pack up and start to hike back up to Healy Pass. We take a little sidetrip up the ramparts and see some really fabulous views:




When we get to Healy Pass, Sachi suddenly exclaims that he sees the grizzly! I'm shocked since it's just a really tiny, basically a moving spec at the bottom of the valley. It's somewhere in the picture below, the arrow should help, hehe.



The whole day, we don't see anyone on the trails, and we eventually get to the lower camping area. There is nobody there and we get to pick the best campsite, right beside a creek. So, we can wash up, refill and sleep to the sound of the rumbling creek. Very nice! Plus it's much warmer too, hehe.

Day 3 (Tuesday)

It rains during the night. Luckily, we're nice and dry inside the tent. The next morning, it's very cold and when we look out of the tent, it's snowing! And by the time we're packed up and ready to go, we have an inch of snow and it's still falling!




We have a nice relaxed 2km walk on the virgin snow, along with some birds and some 4-footed, 3-toed animal that jumps, hehe. We see all the same sites on our walk back, but this time under a cover of snow. Remember the earlier bridge picture? Here's what it looked like coming back:



When we get back to the car, we decide we look clean enough (and smell decent enough) to go straight to lunch, at Grizzly House! There, we have one of the best meals I've ever had. We start off with an appetizer of raclette, and then I have my Alberta beef fondue and Sachi has various game which we grill on a hot rock. We have venison, buffalo and wild boar. The portions were kinda small so we decided to get another order of meat and the server recommends caribou. Wow, that is good meat, very tender and tasty! I even get my own portion, that's how good it was, hehe.

Next, we're off to Moraine Lake where we stay at a nice (but expensive) lodge just beside the lake.



We take some pics of the lake, though it's not as blue in the fading light. We also climb up the literal Rockpile to get some better shots. And then we get a nice, classy dinner at the lodge where I noisily drop my fork into my unusual plate a few times, drop some food while taking it off Sachi's plate, and generally being uncultured. :-)

Day 4 (Wednesday)

Sachi gets up early and takes some fabulous classic sunrise pics of Moraine Lake:



Me, I decide to spend a couple more hours in my warm and soft bed. We pack up and head up the Icefields Parkway where we stop at a couple of nice places, the best of which was the blue, blue, Peyto Lake



After about an hour of driving, we get up to Athabasca Glacier where the wind is so strong, they cancel the tour right after ours... we barely see anything through the blowing snow... But it's still really cool that I get to step on a glacier..



We spend the night at Lake Louise Inn and get some laundry done to get ready to go camping the next day.

Day 5 (Thursday)

We catch the first morning shuttle to Lake O'hara. It's a sensitive alpine area so they don't allow private cars, just a limited number of people via shuttle, or if you're up to it, a "short" 9km walk.

We get dropped off at the campsite which about a 10 minute walk to the lake itself. Unfortunately, the weather turns from bad to worse that day, so we decide to skip the hike and just do a walk around the lake. Bad idea... we get soaked, but luckily, we end up at the Lake O'hara lodge where it's open to the public for afternoon tea. We get to warm up and dry up by the fire, and even read books from their interesting library for a couple of hours.

We then walk back to our cozy little campsite and take advantage of the facilities which include a relatively nice (but non-flushable) bathrooms, manual water pump, covered eating and cooking area and sink. We make a wood fire, then dinner, and then, almost lose the dinner because we put it on top of the stove where the heat promptly melts the bottom of the packaging. :-)

There are a few other people at the site but few enough that we get to keep a table to ourselves and get to hang our stuff to dry on the walls. After dinner, we hang out at the camp where it's cold but cozy and watch Appleseed on the PSP. Unfortunately, it runs out of batteries before we finish the movie and my DS won't even start because of the cold batteries. That should teach us not to bring electronics camping, hehehe.

Day 6 (Friday)

The next morning, we hear that a tree fell on one of the others' tents. We kinda heard a commotion that night but didn't realize what it was. Luckily, no one was hurt.

The day starts a little wet but get much better after we have breakfast. We decide to go on the Opabin trail. It's a great trail with some wonderful views:



The pictures can sure speak for themselves...

We take the 4:30 shuttle back to the car and drive back to Banff where we stop by Vermilion lakes. More Wows...





We then reward ourselves with a meal at Bumper's, The Beef House where I have the Rib and Ribs dinner.. :-) We then drive to Best Western where we're glad to be in an American hotel with free breakfast, a pool and underground parking.

Day 7 (Saturday)

Going home... boo hoo hoo... I guess the plane doesn't feel like leaving yet either because we have a fuel spill and have to move to a different plane. And, since they couldn't normally move the catering service because of the spill, the airplane personnel actually pushed the carts into the terminal, past 3 gates, onto our new plane. The airline attendant said that it's the first she's ever seen anything like that in the 20 years she's been flying... When we finally get to Newark, we get confused when we have to pick up our car because the bus drops us off at a different station than where we got on. We didn't realize that there were so many stations and that the parking lot was sooo huge. So I stayed with the bags and Sachi hunted down the car... So it was a tiring trip back, but oh so worth it. Really not bad for < $1000 per person, eh?