Banff National Park

Thursday June 29, 2006

I didn’t even realize the irony of my last statement in last night’s blog. For those of you with little memory, or too lazy to scroll down, I said “ There’s also an ice field up north in Jasper National Park, where you can walk on a Glacier. (Something I wanted to do in Glacier but was stopped by the snow.)” Get it? I was stopped from walking on a glacier by the snow. Ahhh, the irony. (Can you define irony? I didn’t think so.) (And a quick note: I’m typing this up about 8:10 pm on 6/29 after drinking half a bottle of wine and some scotch. Needless to say this blog might get a) a little wordy and b) a little weird. You’ve been warned.)

Okay, so we have a great night’s sleep in Canmore, Alberta – who knew. I slept in until 8:30 am when Sage told me to get up. We packed up our clothes (some still wet from the bad dryer at the hotel) and headed out to Tim Hortons. For those of you who don’t watch Hockey Night in Canada every Saturday night, Tim Hortons is the Dunkin’ Donuts of Canada. They don’t have a huge selection of doughnuts, but they also offer bagels, muffins, and a large selection of coffees. (And if you ever watch a Canadian hockey team play there is almost always a Tim Hortons ad on the side of the dasher boards. Check it out next year.) With our coffee and Boston Crème donuts we then stopped by Swift Lube for an oil change. I figured Rocky needed one after 7,000 miles or so. (A note on oil changes: We bought our Saturn VUE in 2002, and after over 4 years it has over 60,000 miles on it, not too bad. When we bought it the Saturn dealership, of course, suggested we get oil changes every 3,000 miles. In the car’s manual, however, they said that oil changes were only necessary every 6,000 – 7,500 miles. When I approached my dealership with this inconsistency, they replied, “The traffic in the DC area is so bad that we recommend an oil change every 3,000 miles.” I actually emailed the main Saturn office on this policy and their reply, to paraphrase, was basically, “that’s bollocks”. I’ve always done oil changes every 6-7,000 miles since then, and Rocky has never had a problem.) The oil change wasn’t so swift, but in an hour or so we were on our way to Banff.

We got to Banff around 11:00 am and stopped at the visitor’s center to get some info. We got some info on hikes in the area and a map, and then decided to walk the town and do some souvenir shopping. We stopped for lunch at a Japanese noodle shop (Sage liked hers, I hated mine), and decided, since we were staying at a condo with a kitchen, to stop by a grocery store for some food. One of the things we really are getting sick of on this trip is eating out all the time, so having a kitchen and being able to cook a home cooked meal was something we really wanted to take advantage of. We got supplies to make a nice Italian gravy, as well as some chicken to roast up sometime, and then went to check in.

When we got into our condo we sat down to figure out what we wanted to do in Banff. Since Banff wasn’t on our “original agenda”, we didn’t have a lot of info (actually, no info) on hikes, locations, etc. We started figuring out what we wanted to do, and we realized that 2 days wasn’t going to be enough. We wanted to do some hiking in Banff, check out Lake Louise and the area up there, and also go up to the Columbia Icefield, one of the biggest shelves of ice outside the arctic zone. (Also a bit of total disclosure: I REALLY want to see the England/Portugal and the France/Brazil games on Saturday, which is going to really cut in to our “leisure” time here. But that’s also Canada Day, where Banff is having all sorts of musical acts, jugglers, and mimes, as well as a parade at 5:00 pm, and fireworks at 11:00 pm. I know – 11:00 pm for fireworks? But believe me, any time before that you wouldn’t be able to see them. Yes, the sky stays light THAT LATE. Its’ crazy up here. Like it’s another country or something.) So we’ve decided to stay up to July 3rd, and hopefully we’ll still get somewhere in the US by July 4 for the big big celebrations.

After unpacking and relaxing a bit we set out for a short hike to hoodoos that are just down the road near the Bow River. Unfortunately nothing is ever as easy as it seems. Yellowstone had some horrible trail signs. They’d have a sign that would say “Jackrabbit Mountain, this way”, but they would have no mileage on the sign. Then the trail would fork, but would have no signs telling which way one should go to get to Jackrabbit Mountain. Well, Yellowstone would be considered a finely tuned map compared to Banff. We found the trailhead to these hoodoos without too much trouble, but there was no signage at the trailhead with any information as to how to get to the hoodoos. As we started hiking the trail kept splitting without any signs. And not just splitting once or twice, but splitting several times, none with any indication as to which way one should go. I sort of blame ourselves for this, as we have no good maps of the area, but really, how hard would it be to simply put some signs on the trail saying, “Hey, yahoo – you’re going in the right direction”? Nevertheless, we saw the hoodoos from above, and they really weren’t that interesting, considering we’ve been to the pinnacle of hoodoos in Bryce Canyon. After leaving that area we drove across town to an area that had some trails around a marshy area. I’m not too in to seeing fish or water fowl, which is what this trail was all about, so I was sort of vanilla to that whole show.

We got back to our condo around 4-ish and started to cook a gravy. Sage said it came out fine, but I thought it sucked, so I didn’t have much of it. (I get really picky about cooking a ragu…I have to use just the right type of tomatoes, with the right type of wine and the right amounts of herbs, and all of those things were impossible to find in Banff, Alberta, Canada, World, The Universe. Or maybe I’m just an Italian food snob.) At least the wine Chianti was good. After dinner we played some games (backgammon, Quiddler) before finishing the night watching Anderson Cooper. Tomorrow we’ll be heading up to Lake Louise, and hopefully do a couple of hikes around the lakes up there. It’s pretty amazing staying right in the middle of a National Park, and having 5 other National Parks all within a couple of hours away (Jasper, Yoho, Kootenay, Glacier, and Mount Revelstoke are the others.) I think we also got lucky (again) with the weather. Yesterday it was over 95 degrees (yes!!) when we drove through Calgary, but today it was about 75 degrees, and the clerk at the front desk told me it was supposed to be like this right through the holiday weekend, with no rain in the forecast. (She also said about 3 years ago, on Canada Day, they had to close the highway to Jasper because of snow. Snow on July 1!)

We keep hearing about the bad wildfires out west, though they seem to be mostly in Arizona and Colorado. Thankfully we got out of there (and as far as the Grand Canyon, we never made it) before any of the fires took off. I guess we should also be thankful that we’re missing all the rain and flooding back home. Our house isn’t in a flood zone at all, and according to Ashley the basement is dry, so we’re all set there. So I’m not complaining. I know…a shocker!