I am really loving Banff. It’s such a cool little town and I can imagine it’s a real party town during the winter ski season. There is plenty going on at the moment which is effectively the tourist shoulder season. There has been Bikefest on for the last four days which has seen road bike racing and today mountain biking races happening around the town, along with novelty races for people in costumes and even racing events for kids. The whole town has been bike mad for the weekend.
There has also been a Classic Car expo on for the last two days which has seen the place fill up with hot rods and well kept antique vehicles – good fun to see these gorgeous old cars tootling around the mountains.
The town itself is ideally laid out for tourism and special events type stuff… it’s very easy to navigate (if you don’t factor in manoeuvring around big holiday campers and the monster pick up trucks!) around with most of the streets laid out in a cool and easy grid pattern and named after local wild life – our hotel is on Elk Street which intersects with Bear St, Lynx St and Squirrel St. Across the other side of Banff Avenue is my favourite street…
Of course!!! 😀
Today we went for a drive up around the lakes area and checked out the lakes area. Stopped first at Lake Minnewanka (pronounced Mini-wanker… lol) where we saw people going on cruises around the lake, people fishing on the lake shore and some absolutely mad bastards getting ready to go diving IN the lake. Holy shit it must be freezing, I can’t imagine wanting to dive up here, too cold for coral or such, so I have no idea what there is to see in the murky blue/grey glacial waters (might have to do some googling on that and find out what they are looking for). After Minnewanka, we head over to Two Jacks Lake where there was camping and more anglers and even more divers! Ran into this not even a little bit camera shy little guy… snapped him this close even with the iPhone. Some people were saying these are squirrels but they don’t have the squirrelly fluffy tails, and they don’t have chipmunky stripes, so we think they are gophers of some sort
We also came across some more mountain sheep too… they are all moulting and looking all mottled, I imagine they look very cool when they have lost all their winter coats and are a sleek brown colour.
Stopped for a while at Johnson Lake where there was a wee sandy beach and a little bit of a cascade running off under a bridge… very picturesque and lots of people sitting around enjoying the bright summer day.
After that we wet to the other side of town to Bow River (yep, ‘first thing you know, I’ll be back in Bow River again’ has been going through my head all day because we were eventually heading this way) to see the cascades there. Also very pretty, this whole areas has more and more picture postcard beautiful viewpoints and lookouts than you can poke a stick at. Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous.
