Day 99 – July 11

As we were only planning to have one night in Banff on our way to spend the weekend with our nephew Ken and his wife Renee in their cottage north of Calgary, we were up early and on the road. Our route was down the Icefields Parkway and what we had read and been told of its scenery was if anything understated. If the Yukon topped the Blue Ridge Mountains and Alaska trumped the Yukon, the Icefields Parkway through the Canadian Rockies just left us gobsmacked. The Rockies are simply just magnificent. This road is a neck wrecker, continuous spectacular scenery on both sides – majestic mountains, glaciers, waterfalls, turquoise lakes.

As it rises through the mountains the Icefields Parkway takes you from the meadowy, piney, montane valley floor near Jasper through the higher elevation of the thick spruce and fir forests of the subalpine zone to the treeless alpine zone and then back down again delivering you at Lake Louise. We stopped at Lake Louise because you can’t not stop at Lake Louise and look.

I was surprised at how small Lake Louise was, by my quick calculation if everyone standing around having their picture taken in front of the tidy bowl blue lake had joined hands they could have easily ringed the bowl. Regardless it is a spectacular setting, I just happen to enjoy my spectacles of nature in quieter surroundings so we took some obligatory photos and moved along.

Lake Louise

A million Kodak moments

Our next order of business was accommodations for the night. The two sites closest to Banff were along the Bow Valley Parkway and we settled on the Johnston Canyon Campground which was all dry camping but had showers. An interesting twist on buying firewood here was that you pay extra for a site with a fire pit but the wood is free. After a few snacks to hold us till supper we headed the 20 kilometres to Banff. There were some signs of damage from the recent floods along the way as road crews were active repairing washouts and cleaning debris from the road shoulders.

How best to describe Banff – well if you took equal parts of Disney World, the Gap and North Face, shook them together in a designer label purse, added a generous dose of German and Japanese accents with just a soupson of Australian for flavour and then smashed the whole thing against the foot of some mountains you would have Banff.

More so than Jasper, Banff is manicured and managed, almost contrived, you feel you are on a movie set. Every streetscape ends with a spectacular view of the mountains, there is no litter, no graffiti, no homeless people, they are not in the script.

Beautiful Downtown Banff

Everywhere a photo

We parked next to the museum, where two young female museum staff were set up in period clothing as prospectors, complete with canvas tent and fire over which they were asking passers by to cook bannock. We quickly took up their offer and cooked our already prepared bannock over their fire. A group of non English speaking Japanese tourists were there as well and amazingly, from almost 4 decades ago, we could recall the Japanese word for delicious, ‘oishii’, which surprised and pleased them as much as us and really impressed the two ‘prospectors’. Our bannock was delicious, maybe a new menu item for us.

Bannock to go

We walked around Banff for a while, a very pleasant town to explore and then took a drive up to the very impressive and imposing Bannf Springs Hotel, very swish indeed, but frankly I doubt if staying there is more fun than life in the BRT. Back at the campsite some much appreciated showers and a meal of barbecued bratwurst made for a great end to the day.