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Been a while since I posted anything on my blog, but I figure our trip to Banff and Jasper National Parks is a good opportunity.

We spent a total of 6 days there, 4 in Banff and 2 in Jasper. Most of our time was spent hiking among the mountains and glaciers, so needless to say we ended up taking hoards of pictures... not to worry, I won't subject you to too many of them here.

Our days were pretty routine. We stayed at bed and breakfasts in both places, so every morning we had a nice breakfast provided for us. We spent the days hiking and sometimes driving (due to rain), and were almost always in bed by 9:30! Our excuse is that we were fairly tired each evening, but those of you that know us also know that we are like that at home sometimes too :) At any rate, neither town had much of a nightlife to boast!

Because I am doing these entries all at once after our trip, if you want to go through the postings chronologically (although there is no need to), you will need to start at the back (Day 1) and work your way forward.

There are more pictures from this trip you can see on Ujjaini Picasa web album by clicking here.

On our way to Calgary, there were some stops along the Icefields Parkway that we couldn't make when we were headed to Jasper. One of these was a short walk (1 mile or so) to a couple of glaciers lying at the feet of one of the tallest mountains in the area, Mt. Edith Cavell. The picture below is another stitching of 4 pictures. On the top right is Angel Glacier flowing down over the mountain and right next to Cavell Glacier (over the water).

The next stop was the Columbia Icefield which is the largest unbroken piece of ice in North America. Unfortunately, it was rainy, windy, cold, and foggy when we were there, so we couldn't see too much of it. Also, apparently if you don't lock your car doors in the Columbia Icefield parking lot, then Carmen Sandiego will break in and take your stuff!

Being our only full day in Jasper, we wanted to choose a good day hike. The Bald Hills are series of mountains that lie among some mightier brethren. This hike ended up being one of the most difficult ones we did during the trip. When we started out, we knew that it was a 500m climb up to the most popular Bald Hills lookout. As is the case with many hikes in this area, it seems that they make you work hard to get to the scenery, not allowing you much to enjoy along the way, only to reward you in the end.

Getting to the base of that hill was fine, but the final climb to the top was pretty tough. The route was all made up of what looked like crushed shale rock, with snow on top of it! Not to mention how steep it was.


As usual getting to the top was incredible. There was a full 360 degree view of the mountains around us. Unfortunately, the 36o degree panorama that I took with our camera did not stitch together very well. Below is just a 3 segment piece of it.

Apparently, some hardcore hikers use this summit as a starting point to troll along these mountain tops all day. The picture below shows one of these folk off in the distance (the tiny speck on top of the adjacent hill). This is also supposed to be a popular spot to see some caribou, but we weren't so lucky.


The 6km back down the mountain was uneventful but still interesting. We took a different trail down, which went right through the forest instead of its outskirts, so it provided some interesting sights (including a variety of strange mushrooms).

That ended our days in the mountains. We were headed to Calgary the next day.

We were on our way to Jasper today, and the route up from Lake Louise is called the Icefields Parkway, and many say it is one of the most beautiful drives in the world. It would be hard to argue against that. Along the way we stopped at a few glaciers as well as Peyto Lake.

Once we got to Jasper, we walked around the small town and then got down to planning what hike we wanted to do the next day. Since we only had one full day there, we wanted to make it a good one.

Not our most exciting day here. We were planning on doing a pretty cool day hike in an area West of Banff, but as we got there the rain came pouring down and basically did not stop all day. We took the opportunity to drive around and catch some sights that we might not have seen otherwise. Only worth showing one picture from this day. It is at Moraine Lake, which is near Lake Loiuse.

After a fairly nasty dinner of Chinese food, we were again in bed pretty early and ready for our trip up the Icefields Parkway the following day...

After a fairly strenuous hike the previous day, we wanted to do a lighter trail this morning and follow that up with some more touristy stuff in Banff. In the morning, we did a trail called Sundance Canyon, which actually didn't have much great scenery. We did however see a coyote and an elk along the way, which was pretty cool. The elk was a really big bull with impressive antlers. The picture is through the trees, so it's not easy to see. It would have been nice to get closer, but apparently this is 'rutting' season (mating) and the bulls are fairly aggressive.

While doing some research on good day hikes in the Banff area, I came across one called The Plain of Six Glaciers. It's located around Lake Louise, which is about 45km (that's right, one week in Canada, and I'm all metric) from Banff.

After parking at the lake site, you walk along a short path to the lake where you are greeted with this amazing first sight (couldn't do anything about being directly into the Sun).

What you see straight between the two mountains and behind the Lake is Victoria Glacier... where we would be in about 3 hours! The first part of this hike traditionally involved taking the flat path along the Northern shore of the lake before climbing up to the Plain of Six Glaciers. The owner of the bed and breakfast where we were staying mentioned to us that there is an alternate route one can take that involves climbing a little more steeply right in the beginning and the traversing along the mountain side, as opposed to the lake shore. She promised some terrific scenery from that vantage point, and she wasn't lying.

So we started off right in front of the Chateau and at this point we had made it pretty close to the end of the lake with a great view back. The color of the water in all of the lakes here is this amazing blue. The water that flows into them comes from the nearby glaciers which carry with them white sand-like rocks (from the erosion process) and this sand refracts the sunlight passing through to give it this color. If this had been a cloudless day, you would see that the color of the lake almost matches the color of the sky!

While this view was great, we couldn't hang around forever, as we were only halfway to the teahouse... that's right a teahouse. Lake Louise actually has a couple of teahouses. The Lake Agnes teahouse is a little more popular and is just slightly higher up from the path we took along the mountain side. There is also the Plain of Six Glaciers teahouse where we were headed.

Once you get to the teahouse, there is an extra 1.3km trail you can take to the very end. From there, you are looking up at Mt. Victoria, down at Victoria Glacier, and back across the entire lake and Chateau. After almost 3.5 hours (thanks to many stops for pictures), we finally reached the end.

Oddly enough the flat portion on the left side of the picture that just looks like loose rock, is actually Victoria Glacier. If you look closely, you will see that the rocks are covering a crevace filled layer of ice. It's was pretty cool to look back down the mountain and see where we started the trek from. Although, we only saw one glacier here, not 6!



This was an interesting little cabin, with two levels of outdoor seating. The people who work here have there own cabin behind the teahouse where they stay Mon through Fri. The go home Friday evening for the weekend. Just the week before we arrived there was a bear sighting here... we JUST missed it, which kind of sucks. Although it was a grizzly apparently, so maybe that was a good thing.

We reached Canmore that evening around 7pm, found some dinner and were in bed by 9... this turned out to be a theme of this vacation!