We are in beautiful Jasper today and the sun is shining and the birds are singing and the squirrels are gambolling in the woods… well, I am pretty sure the sun is shining above all this cloud, and the birds might be singing somewhere else and the squirrels are probably sensibly hiding from the rain. Good morning to spend in the laundromat and keeping out of the rain for a bit. Isn’t that just one of the worst bits about travelling? Having to use laundry rooms and laundromats with foreign equipment and nasty arse fellow travellers who refuse to remove their washed or dried clothing from machines in a timely fashion! Anyway, pottered around doing some mending and washing this morning.

Late morning we went for a drive out to check out Lake Patricia, the one where our little bungalows are and even though it was overcast and Pyramid Mountain was up in the clouds, by then, it was no longer raining so it was looking pretty good. Apparently during WWII they used Patricia Lake up here in the middle of nowhere as a secret military facility associated with a Project Habbakuk – an attempt to try and build unsinkable air craft carriers and ships out of ice and timber…. yeah, fucking ambitious! Anyway, it was a complete disaster and people now dive in Lake Patricia to check out the wrecks from their attempts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habbakuk

After that we decided to go for a drive and a short walk that was recommended to us by one of the ladies working the main counter here at Patricia Lake Bungalows. It is called the Valley of the Five Lakes and she said it was a 15 minutes walk into see the lakes and it sounded pleasant enough, and it wasn’t raining, so off we went. We got there and started in on the track which was an easy enough walk for about the first kilometre and a half, and then it went down hill sharply :S Hmmm… not too fussed about going down hill. Every step down I take is one more that I have to take up, increasing the lower back pain and risk of you know, upchucking on the side of the walkway into the forest somewhere (I wonder, does human spew attract bears?). We get down this steep little gully and walk over a boarded creek of about 50m where we run into some fellow walkers… ‘G’day. Do you guys have any idea where these lakes are?’

‘Yep, up that big hill over there and down the other side about a kilometre is the first small lake, and then you keep going round the track and you find the other four lakes.’ I stood there for a few seconds and looked at the track, which went pretty much straight up for about 100m over rocks and roots on a muddy path, and went ‘Ah… no.’ I hate admitting defeat, but I knew I already had to walk up the steep gully we had come past already and heading over a steep hill was not going . So, I turned around and headed back to the parking lot. 🙁 Good thing I did turn back when I did too… by the time I got to the top of the initial sloping gully, I was in tears from pain, my neck was clicking and crunching really bad, and I was very relieved that I had skipped lunch! Took it easy wandering back to the car, but feeling like a dreadful failure and a useless piker and a waste of fucking space. I should be able to do a walk like his and it pisses me off that I can’t. I don’t look like there is anything wrong with me, but I am sure the guys we asked directions from just thought I am an unfit lazy person who couldn’t be bothered doing the walk. And then I was berating myself for giving a shit what these two people, (who I will never see again!) thought anyway! What’s with that?

You’ll notice the decided lack of pictures of the Valley of Five Lakes…

By the time I got to the car I was feeling pretty wretched, both physically and from the emotional beat down I was giving myself. It was then that I stopped and read the sign on the way into the place – Valley of the Five Lakes: 4.5km return, 1.5 to 2 hour hike, elevation gain 112m, elevation loss 124. And then I felt foolish for even attempting it. :S It’s one thing to go ‘No, that is beyond my capability’ and not even give it a go, it is another entirely to set off on a wee adventure and have to admit you’re past the pale and have to pull the pin 🙁 Doesn’t feel to good to have to give up without even being able to give it a solid attempt. Lesson learned: do your own research and don’t rely on intel from others.

After that little debacle (ie: when Aunty Mary came back from going over to see the lakes), we went downtown for a bit to check out the National Parks information centre and to grab a few supplies (more alcohol for the people!). Wandered around a bit, had a look at the tacky souvenirs…

Then we had a short drive out to Pyramid Lakes before heading back to our little cabin for some wine, cheese and crackers – has to be done! Another quiet night planned… steaks on the BBQ for dinner and wine… lots of wine.

I have driven along the Amalfi in Italy Coastline, I have driven the Great Ocean Road in Victoria, I have driven through the monasteries of Meteora in Greece, I have driven through Arthurs Pass in New Zealand and I have driven through the ancient hills of Kapadokya in Turkey… but I don’t think I have ever been on a more scenic drive than the one we did today from Banff to Jasper along the Columbia Icefields Parkway in Alberta, Canada.

From the moment we set out I knew the 243km drive which should take around three hours was going to take all day, if we got to Jasper before nightfall it would be a bloody miracle because there are so many lookouts, overlooking so many lakes, waterfalls and rivers and mountains and glaciers that I knew we would be stopping every five minutes as a new vista unfolded in front of us… so I am just going to dump a tonne of pictures on here. Sorry these are all from my iPhone so the ‘good’ pictures are actually still in the camera! Squee! 😛 I have filled one 8GB compact flash card already, might have to slow down a bit…

So not long after we set off and got north of the Lake Louise turn off and hit the Icefields Parkway proper we set a turn off and it is beside Hector Lake, I mean barely 10 minutes into the trip. Hector Lake:

Bit further on we pulled over again for a bit of a looksee just because there were other people pulled over on a space on the side of the road and found ourselves looking at Mt Patterson and then Lake Howse…

Little further up the road, but before we hit the Icefields Centre we came past the Saskatchewan Crossing, the Saskatchewan River and the Saskatchewan Glacier – I just wrote that because I like to say Saskatchewan so much! 😀

So much beautiful scenery, I am amazed at how the reflections on the lakes looked, even on just my iPhone happy snaps, and the scenery just kept on getting more and more impressive! Such huge majestic mountains, fabulous green/blue lakes and the weather… well we thought we were going to get 19 degrees and raining all day but instead there was alternately sunny and cloudy and plenty of patches of blue to bring out some colour in our photos. So lucky yet again – this is turning into the More Arse than Class Tour of Canada as far as the weather is concerned.

When we were in Banff and went up the Gondola we had purchased tickets to also go out for a Glacier Adventure at the Icefield Centre which is roughly half the way up the Parkway (it was a buy both attractions thing and get a discount). So when we arrived at the Parkway we lined up to go out onto the glacier. Now the closest I have ever gotten to walking near/on glaciers was the Fox and Franz Joseph Glaciers in New Zealand, and not diminish the wonderful experiences I had there, but nothing compares to the amazing couple of hours we spend out on the Columbia Icefield driving out ONTO the absolutely enormous Asthabasca Glacier.

We were first loaded into a regular coach and ferried out into the turnaround point where they put us onto a $1.3 million dollar 6WD ice explorer bus. Apparently there are 23 of these ice explorers in the world and 22 of them operate on the Columbia Icefields (the other one is owned by the USA government and is in Antarctica being put to use by scientists). All loaded onto the ice explorer and we find out our driver is a larrikin from Coffs Harbour named Rowan and he keeps everyone entertained in true brash Aussie fashion for the duration, largely making jokes at his own expense and clowning around. To get down to the glacier we go down the 2nd steepest hill in North America – a 32 degree incline! Fark, talk about sphincter tightening fun, but the vehicle is equipped with transmission locks and 6WD so no chance of running off down the hill at full tilt. We get a guided tour with lots of information about glaciers, about this one in particular, the history and all sorts of local trivia about the vegetation, the environment, the first pioneers etc. And after a short drive full being stuffed full of information we get to this:

Unbelievably beautiful. Here we are walking around, well driving around in a 30 tonne truck on over 1000 feet of slow moving ice! The clouds gave way a bit and we got to see the place in full splendour and while we were out there, we were the only bus load wandering about (as we were leaving, three ice explorer buses were headed up at the same time… too many people by half I think).

These photos are of the Asthabasca and Andromeda Glaciers which are the largest in the Columbia Icefields Park, off to the right was the Snowdome Galcier which has the distinction of feeding water down into three water ways… that eventually lead to the Arctic, the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans. The only mountain/glacier in the world that distributes water to three separate oceans, which sounds trivial but is totally cool when you think about it.

I took so many photos here, I am sure that there will be at least one good one! After we tramped on the glacier for about half an hour, felt how cold the water was, slipped and slid around a bit on the large flat expanse made for the ice explorer buses, it was back to the Icefield Centre for a spot of lunch before we kept going. First stop as we head off towards Jasper again was past the Never Ending Chain, which is an unbroken mountain range of just on 27km long – the longest on the continent apparently (Rowan from Coffs Harbour did his job well, what with me remembering all this info he fed us).

After that we had to get a bit more disciplined with our stops. We stopped at Tangle Creek and on other place before stopping for a good wander around at the Asthabasca Falls area. It was just off the side of the road and we weren’t expecting much but had a wander around and saw the most amazing glacial waterfalls, complete with abandoned routes where the water had gone, but now was carving a different path through the mountain pass.

Aunty Mary really loved the waterfalls and that last photo is one she snapped on her iPhone which she wanted me to include. All up a huge day and I think you could drive through there every day for a week and now see every scenic lookout and stop.

We have now arrived at our destination (Thank you, Sondra!) which is the Patricia Lakes Bungalows in Jasper where we have three nights to go check out Jasper National Park and, if we are feeling very adventurous because the weather is supposed to turn cold and wet and it’s already cold, maybe… big maybe, go for some white water rafting (not sure my back will cope but I am sick of letting it control my life!) All up an absolutely amazing day full of impossibly beautiful vistas and more gorgeous scenery than you could process in a month of Sundays! Only wee let down today is that there was a shocking lack of wildlife out and about, for what turned out to be a rather warm and balmy day… only one herd of bighorn sheep and one teeny tiny chipmunk who was not amenable to having his photo taken 😉

Last day in Banff… I’ll be sad to go actually. The place feels to me very much like a cross between Queenstown in New Zealand with an older European feel like Innsbruck in Austria. Either way, it’s a very cool little town with plenty of character and attracts the young and old alike. Other than the fact that this place probably gets bloody cold and is full of adventure junkies in the winter time, I think I could live in a town like this for a while. Probably not indefinitely – the educational opportunities are a little limited! I heard the local highschool band practising this afternoon and it was almost (note: not quite) as bad as the Pakistani Military Highland Bagpipe band… how alarming! 😀

We went for a drive out to Canmore this morning which is about half an hour from Banff to check out the Nordic Centre which hosted many events during the Calgary Winter Olympics and has some nice look outs over the Three Sisters Mountains. Yep, for some reason mountains that come in threes, are always sisters and not brothers. Why is that? Is it the same reason that cars and boats are usually a ‘she’? I don’t know. We also had a look up at a place called Quarry Lake where I was foolhardy enough to take off my shoes and stick my toes in for a dip! Well, there was little French-Canadian kids toddling about in the lakeside on what passes for a beach (really fine little rocks, not even rounded pebbles) and I figured it couldn’t be that bad if these kids were puddling in the waters edge.. Stayed in the water for all of about… oh a minute and a half and felt sufficiently refreshed so jumped out of there quick smart!

I noticed that for a rather small lake there were dozens of fish jumping out of the water and it took a while to figure out why. There were mosquitos there. Big ones and when I got into the water I could see them and some other little flying gnat thing buzzing about low over the water and the fishes were jumping out of the water attempting to catch the bugs. Very cool way to catch some dinner and it covered the lake surface with pretty ripples from the fish plopping back into the water.

After Canmore we head back to Banff where Aunty Mary decided to go do a short hike up Tunnel Mountain and I went in search of a ND (neutral density) filter for my main camera lens – it’s so bright here with all the ice and snow that the good old CP (circular polarizer) filter that does the trick at the beach just doesn’t cut the mustard to reduce the glare enough and we are hitting big, huge, fuck off, glacier territory soon. Thankfully Banff has enough tourists to support a decent camera store and I managed to buy a Hoya Pro ND filter for about $80 less than I would have paid over at PhotoContinental near home. Nice.

I also bought a wee folding umbrella because today I saw the most bizarre thing around lunch time. The weather was fantastic this morning… about 11 degrees, sunny and crisp, blue skies and lovely for our drive to Canmore and probably got to about 20 degrees. Arrived back here about lunch time and noticed a little dark cloud in the west. By the time lunch was on the table, the little dark cloud was over us, thunder and lightening, very very frightening and dumping a fair amount of freezing cold water on us with absolutely no warning whatsoever! The weather just spun on a dime, never seen anything like it and definitely not at lunch time. By mid afternoon it was all gone, no sign of it, blue skies again? Werid.

Oh, and I found myself a unique souvenir of Canada. When I travel I like to buy lapel pins for my coffee table at home and not much else by way of souvenirs. I prefer to find one unique piece to remind my of my entire trip so as not to clutter my house up full of stuff that will evenutally be thrown out or doesn’t look quite right at home anyway. So in Turkey, I bought a Baloch carpet (and a tonne of pashmina, but I gave most of those away!), and in Pakistan I bought a Istfahan rug (and some more pashmine, some of which I gave away!), in Indonesia, we bought the fat man, and so on and so forth. Well, I went into a little gallery here and found a wall art piece that is in a maple tree design and is made by an artist in British Columbia. He makes them all to order and puts customized initials into the maple tree and I have had it shipped by surface mail back to Australia (it should just beat me home). It is the only thing here that has caught my eye and I think it will make a lovely souvenir of my time in Canada…

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.

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.