Banff – weather forecast: 19 degrees, overcast and cloudy with intermittent showers.
Bugger… but woke up this morning and peeked out of the curtain to a gorgeous blue sky and a fabulous sunny day! Awesome! And that means… no rest for the wicked (aka Aunty Mary) as I threw open the curtains and started making so ‘getting ready’ noises. No time for sloth and no time for breakfast, as I wanted to get out of the hotel and up to the Banff Gondola that goes up to the Sulphur Mountain summit and sky walk before the crowds were up and about.
Got out to the gondola departure area and may have had a wee little internal squee of excitement to discover the plan was coming together – the car park was empty and there was hardly a soul in sight. No queue for tickets, no queue to get on the gondola! Jumped straight on and headed for the top, keeping our eyes peeled for wildlife as we went. Got out at the summit and went ‘holy snappin’ duck shit it’s fucking freezing!’ Took a few minutes to rejig ourselves as we put on our warmer kit and then struck out for a stroll along the Sulphur Mountain Skywalk. Sorry did I say stroll? I must be on crack… it was a hard slog of a ‘stroll’, especially breathing in the freezing cold air and with the sun moving behind the clouds somewhat. Not to mention the steps, of which there were 784 (I know this to be true – because Aunty Mary counted them), by the time you got to the summit and back out again. The views though… wow. Talk about amazing views!
We stayed up the mountain for about two hours and snapped away like good little tourists sufficiently Sandisking the moments for posterity. Every now and then the pitfalls of walking around with a DL: I’d get tapped on the shoulder “You look like someone who knows how to use a camera, can you take a photo of me and my (insert relation of choice – spouse/child/friend etc)?” Sure, snap half a dozen photos in portrait and landscape mode of varying composition and hand camera/happy snapper/phone back. We were still keeping an eye out for the wildlife that was being mentioned on all the boardwalk signage – mountain goats (big white fluffy things), mountain sheep (not as big brown fluffy things), grizzly bears (big big brown and black and dangerous fluffy things), elk and moose (large brown and not so fluffy things). Saw none of them up the mountain but did see plenty of chipmunks (itty bitty striped brown things) scampering about. They are so nimble over the scree it’s fun to watch them run about and they are obviously not bothered by the people at all. Also saw some squirrels (itty bitty brown/grey things with longer fluffier tails) and couldn’t figure out what these little ground rodents were eating all the way up there, but they seemed happy enough. 🙂
Once we had enough of the mountain we came back down to go for a drive up to the Norquay Lookout. We got about half way up the lookout road before encountering a family/herd of the aforementioned mountain sheep! They were all raggedey arse looking because they are moulting at the moment and shedding their winter coats, but there was one big ram with huge horns, a few females and some ‘lamby lamby ding dongs’ in their group. The view back over Banff was very pretty too especially now the sun was well and truly out.
After that we decided to go for a drive around the the Basin and Cave Thermal Pool and check out the original bathing centre that was built in the early 1900s. Unfortunately you can’t go swimming here anymore, they closed the centre to bathers in the 70s as it was damaging the fragile eco system and they have filled in the large pool that was built back in 1912… shame really, I think the place would be far more interesting and pretty with a reflection pool of barely 6″ deep that you are not allowed to go into to at least show you what the place was like back in the day (even if it was filled with town water and had a dark painted bottom to make the water warm… the entire joint smelled of sulphur so you’d feel like it was a thermal pool 🙂 ). Also in the complex is a climb up to the original thermal springs where the native Americans used to bathe probably for hundreds of years… you can see down a hole in the ground to how they would have lowered themselves into the caves where the hot water was (much like the hot springs in a recent GoT ep. :P). After checking out the source of the water and the original hole in the ground that was the access to the grotto, we went down underneath and walked in a short cave to the underground hot spring itself. It was beautiful down there, lovely limestone sparkling roof/ceiling, light spilling down from the hole in the ceiling and the water trickling down one wall and spilling into a waterfall making a deep blue pool at the base. Once upon a time they used to let you swim in here too, but too many tourists equals too much damage to the ecosystem – and by that they mean all people have been kicked out to save the rare and endangered little thermal snail that lives around here somewhere!
On the way out of the complex though we got the surprise of our lives… walked around a corner on a walking track only to discoverer a gigantic male elk feeding on the side of the path. He was easily my height at the shoulder, and a guy near us who said he was from Edmonton claimed that he was the biggest elk he had ever seen (actually the dude from Edmonton is the only reason I am not calling this beastie a moose right now because honestly, I don’t know the difference!), and that he had very large antlers given he was ‘probably only a few years old, eh’. He was a (argh… superlative fail!) amazing? majestic? fantastical? awe inspiring? creature. I’ve never seen anything like this creature in my life. His antlers were about 1.2m wide and we were close enough to see their velvety soft covering. The animal was also young enough that this velvety covering on his antlers was not scarred or marked in anyway, they were perfectly covered and beautifully formed with ends that were about as large as my wrist. The photo from my iPhone doesn’t do him much justice but hopefully the ones I took with my camera are much better. He was as large as a cow and barely 12 feet from us and seemed completely nonplussed by our presence, not bothered one whit… but we could tell by the look of him, that if he took objection to our presence, we’d be in a helluva lot of trouble as that was one enormously muscular hoofed animal!
So after seeing only teeny little ground dwelling creatures – squirrels, gophers and chipmunks – up the mountain known for it’s wildlife sittings we ended up seeing some mountain sheep and a gigantic elk in the middle of some other place. Doing well so far, feel confident there will be bears any day now… and then it’ll be moose and elk and bears, oh my!
Just when to bears do come out of hiding, can we put in a request to see them at a safe distance at the end of my telephoto lens please? Much obliged.