Trip to Banff: Day 6 (or, rushing around the rest of the Canadian rockies)

This is Thursday. The workshop ended early this morning with an interesting session in which people shared the unsolved problems in this field they thought were possible to solve and useful to have answers to. I took lots of notes and now have some ideas of future research directions in this area. :)

Since I wanted to spend all Friday exploring Calgary so I could have a little part of Saturday to wrap up Calgary before I flew out Saturday evening, this meant I had one day -Thursday- to do all of the Canadian rockies that I could. I'd already read some guidebooks and picked up tons of brochures at every opportunity, so I had a good idea of what there was, what I wanted to see, and what I could manage to see. Given this knowledge, I knew I could manage to do pretty much everything I wanted in one very busy day.

Below is the detailed narrative of everything I did. I took a lot of pictures along the way, and some of them actually include me! (I had previously forgotten how to set the timer on my camera, but remembered this morning to look up directions on the web. So I went a little overboard with timed pictures, taking them whenever I was somewhere and could find a flat surface on which to rest my camera.)

First I headed north to Lake Louise, which was a wonderful blue, conveniently close the road, and packed with tourists.

Second, I drove west into Yoho National Park and swung by the spiral tunnels. These didn't look cool at all -just two pairs of tunnels entering and exiting a mountain- but were neat engineering feats explained in detail through countless interpretative signs. In short, the original grade of the railroad through this area was a tremendously steep 4.5% and caused many problems (and good stories). The spiral tunnels are circular tunnels built into the mountains to reduce the grade: the trains enter and leave in nearly the same place in the mountain but at a lower altitude. The grade was reduced to 2.2% by this technique (which, mind you, is still quite steep by railroad standards).

I tried to go north to view the supposedly quite majestic Takakkaw Falls (Takakkaw means magnificent in Cree according the guidebook), but the road was closed due to remaining snow?! Yes, this was June!

At this point, I started thinking about trying to time lunch. I had a strong recommendation for a restaurant in a hotel back in Lake Louise that closed for lunch at 2pm, and wanted to make it. So I hurried along.

I drove a bit further into Yoho National Park and passed the town of Field. It was a (dying?) small old manufacturing and railroad town that appeared to not have changed in the last few decades.

A little past Field I found the Natural Bridges -another neat engineering marvel- where water has worn away the bottom of large rocks that cross to the river (to make, well, natural stone bridges).

Rushing back to Banff National Park for my intended lunch destination, I found I missed it by ten minutes. Oh well. But in the process of finding the hotel (which wasn't easy because my guidebook had the directions wrong) I found and photographed a very cute little village.

I did have a backup plan for lunch: a little deli that is supposedly quite decent in the strip mall in the center of town. The sandwich I had there was fairly good, primarily because of the good quality of the honey wheat bread with which it was made; the meat and cheese itself was relatively poor and tasteless.

One digression: Over the next couple days, after noticing them first at this deli, I observed many many stores sold meal pies (e.g., chicken pot pies, beef pot pies). Seems to be popular in Canada.

After lunch I headed north, with my intended final destination as the Columbia Icefield (glacier), a two-hour drive each way. On the way north and back south I stopped at many vista points and lookouts (more than six), including Crowfoot Glacier, Bow Summit by Pietro Lake, and Mistaya Canyon (not unlike Natural Bridges). I've labeled the pictures that I can actually identify where they were taken.

The drive north (along the Icefields Parkway) was pretty, passing through many forests, snow-tipped mountains, and winding rivers, and pretty nice in the sense that the road was very well maintained and had practically no cars. (And, as near I could tell, no police either. The rest of Banff definitely had a noticeable police presence enforcing the speed limit. But none were on the Icefield Parkway!) The drive was also nice in the sense that my car had cruise control -a feature my car at home does not have- so I could lay back and relax and look at the sights a little more than I would have been able to otherwise.

After many viewpoints I entered Jasper National Park and, a few kilometers later, found the Athabasca Glacier and the Icefields Centre. I knew I could pay and ride a big heavy-duty bus to the top of Columbia Icefield and look around, but I did that years ago and so wasn't that thrilled about doing it again. Instead, I hiked a bit up the Athabasca Glacier. It's one of the glaciers created by the "overflow" from Icefield and is conveniently close to the road, so the hike was short (although brutally cold and windy). And you wouldn't believe how many warning signs I had to walk by before getting to the small sliver of the glacier that the rangers monitor to make sure it won't collapse. But one item in the hike made me truly realize I wasn't in America. In America, despite all the warnings, they'd rope off all the safe areas and make it difficult to get to the possibly unsafe parts. Here all they did was put small cones every ten feet delimiting the boundary.

After the glacier and many photographs, I decided to wander the Icefields Center to see pictures of what I missed by not taking the bus to the icefield itself, and also to learn some about glaciers and icefields and whatnot. They had some pretty neat exhibits, especially showing how one can study how the earth has changed over time by examining layers in glaciers.

It was around 6pm by the time I was done. I had already decided to stay the night in a town called Canmore, a place with good restaurants just outside of Banff National Park on the way to Calgary. So I had a good two-and-a-half hour drive back south, stopping very rapidly at vista points (run! "okay, I saw it, photographed it, let's move on!"), back past Lake Louise, Banff, and out to Canmore. Once again, during this late drive I appreciated the fact that the sun sets very late.

Another item I appreciated during all this during was Banff's (very low power) park radio. (I could only get a reasonable reception within about 15 kilometers of the town of Banff (i.e., it didn't even cover a quarter of the park).) But I enjoyed it during some of the drives today, as well as some of my drives around Banff on days one and four. They had cute programs: stories about a bear wandering around the south side of Banff, tales about the dangers of scrambling (hiking steep slopes), radio plays promoting environmentalism, an interview with a woman that does bear population estimation and migration tracking, etc. The features repeated pretty often but were definitely fun in an old radio sugary but not saccharine kind of way.

A neat feature of the highways in the park that I meant to photograph but forgot was wildlife bridges. Much of the highways are fenced in on one side or both (to prevent high-speed collisions with animals) but there are occasional bridges over the road. The bridges are covered with lots of dirt and grass; some even have trees growing out of them. The slopes up to the bridges are very gradual. Knowing Canada's national park system (as judged by the radio station), they probably studied the wildlife migration corridors and placed bridges appropriately. Very cool and caring.

In any event, I made to Canmore and went to one restaurant that I'd previously researched that chowhounds seemed to love: Crazyweed Kitchen. (The other restaurant in Canmore they also loved was Valbella Meats, which I planned to go to (and did go to) the next day.)

Crazyweed Kitchen was a cozy place: only a dozen tables, one hostess/waitress (who was nice enough to chat and flirt with me a little throughout dinner), and one chef. I had a nice mixed green salad with a tangy dressing and an amazing fresh perfectly cooked salmon, alongside some nice creamy vaguely spicy corn and vinegary greens with sauteed shitake mushrooms. I know it doesn't sound like anything exotic, but the flavors were actually quite inspired and unusual (and good). I was quite pleased with my meal, and with my glass of white wine (I forgot what kind, but it was from one of the restaurant's selections of open bottles of good wines they wanted to use up).

After dinner (9:45pm), I started very rapid hotel hunting, beginning with inexpensive places that had internet connections. (I really wanted internet to help plan my Calgary activities for the next day.) The first place I went to had one vacancy: for a three bedroom suite. A little expensive... They referred me to another place, but that place had ceased allowing check-ins. Then, it was 9:55pm. I knew according to my guidebook that most hotels in Canmore closed the office at 10pm. So I rushed to a cheap place listed in the guidebook (without internet service) and got myself a room. (I knew it had vacancies because I drove by it on the way to the restaurant, so this last minute adventure isn't quite as risky as it sounds. But it was still a little scary and made me vow to find a hotel earlier for Friday night.)