Glacier Banff and Jasper National Parks August 17- 25, 2013

Glacier National Park

Way back in the summer of 1988, Scott and I drove up north and visited Glacier, Banff, and Jasper National Parks. We thought that it would be nice to let the girls enjoy that on their week vacation from work.  We left our home early on Saturday morning, August 17th for our long 12 hour drive up to Glacier National Park, up in north western Montana.  I thought it would be nice to have Cameron look after the place while we were gone.  

Corie and Cadie jumped out to each new area that we came to, so that we would have documentation of where we had visited.

We camped at the Fish Creek Campground.  There was a little trail that led to the amphitheatre right next to our camping spot.  And right behind us was Fish Creek.  We did some exploring and found a great picture spot.

 


We were close to Lake McDonald, so we drove over there and skipped some rocks and enjoyed the view.

After we played by the lake for awhile, we drove along the shore and found the McDonald River that fed into the lake.  We also found a pretty little waterfall. As we were driving down the road that was parallel to the river, there was a hike.  Scott thought it would take us to the waterfall that we had just seen.  So we started hiking.  We kept on going and going. We thought that it just had to be around the next bend in the trail.  Finally, when we were about to turn around, it was there.  

This was the road that we were driving down and found the hike.  It was so incredibly green and the trees were so dense.  So beautiful.

On Sunday morning, since there weren't any church services offered in the park, we drove through the park.  Glacier National Park had over 150 glaciers in the late 1800's.  Today there are about 26.  They are projecting that by 2020 there won't be any glaciers left in the park.  We drove up the Going to the Sun Road - which took us to Logan Pass and out to St. Mary Lake.

These waterfalls were just on the side of the road as we were driving.

St. Mary Lake was very beautiful.  We saw a couple of eagles out flying over it when we first got there.

We stopped at the little store after viewing the beautiful lake. Cadie found a great pair of gloves in the store that she thought Cameron could use to keep him warm in Denmark.  Then we found these great chairs with little tables in between and thought it would be an awesome place for lunch.  It was very nice and relaxing.

After we ate lunch we drove up to Logan Pass.  There is very limited parking there, so we drove around the parking lot several times before we finally found a spot.  We followed some people who were walking to their car and got their spot. It was a 1-1/2 mile hike up to the Hidden Lake overview.  This was a picture of a waterfall on the side of the trail.  We saw a few mountain goats on the top of the overlook area.  Scott, Corie, and Cadie all wanted to hike down to a little landing so they could see the lake better.  I hiked on down the hill by myself while they had a little adventure of their own.

We left early Monday morning for Canada. We had an 8 hour drive to reach our camping spot in the Lake Louise Village. 

Canada

We had to drive around the bottom of Glacier National Park, as you can't take trailers on the Going to the Sun Road.  Our first stop was at the border patrol. We were the only car there.  We pulled up and gave them our passports.  We thought that we would get them stamped.  But we later found out that since the US and Canada have a treaty between them, no stamps.  We were sad when we found that out.  

We instantly had to change our thinking to the metric system rather than the standard system.  Fortunately, my teaching metrics paid off.  I knew a little bit to help the others understand kilometers vs miles and liters vs gallons.  We drove a few miles to Cardston, which is a very small town, but big enough to have a temple.

We had to get our credit cards approved to go to Canada.  Come to find out that Canada doesn't have the Discover card.  So we had to call up about our Visa card, so we could use that instead.  Our next stop was Calgary.  We wanted to see 2 things - the Calgary Olympic Village and the LDS temple.  Amazingly, the were right across from one another about 10 miles separated them, but they were both up on a hill and you could see the one from the other.

Banff National Park

The drive from Calgary to Banff was really pretty.  Corie sat in the middle section of the car and Cadie slept in the way back.  I tried to keep waking her up so she could see the beautiful mountains and fields.  She would sit up for a minute and then lay back down.  We camped in the Lake Louise Village which is in the middle of the Banff National Park.  It is about 30 minutes north of the city of Banff.

We drove up to Lake Louise and walked around the lake and the hotel.  Then we drove up another canyon to Lake Moraine.  We decided that we definitely had to hike near both of them.

On Tuesday we drove up to the city of Banff and walked around the main street.  We also walked to a cool walking bridge that crossed the Bow River.  There is a really awesome hotel that looks like a castle that we drove by a couple of times.

 The Banff Fairmont Inn 
back and front views

We returned back to our trailer with enough time to do a quick hike.  So we went over to Lake Moraine and hiked up to the top of a rock pile; it was about a 1 mile round trip hike.  On our way to the lake we came upon stopped traffic on a two lane road... That usually only means one thing.... bear.

This bear was right along side of the road.  I didn't even zoom in with my camera for this shot. Corie and Cadie walked up to see what was up.  That was when we got out of the car and walked up about 4 cars in front of us.  The girls were standing right behind a car when I came up. The driver of the car told them if the bear charges they can hop into the car with them.  Just after I took this picture a 2nd bear came out of the trees growling and mad.  I ran so fast back to the car that Corie and Cadie had a good laugh.  I thought it was the mom, but it was only a sibling.  He crossed the road shortly thereafter.  We watched this one for a good 5-10 minutes. 

The two bears on the side of the road.

The color of this lake was such a brilliant blue.  We decided that there has to be something in the sediment that comes down with the glacier melt that makes the lake have such an unusual color.

Wednesday, we hiked up to Lake Agnes which is on the mountain above Lake Louise.  It was a 10K round trip hike. It was pretty steep, but it was so cool.  Right before we reached the lake we came upon a waterfall.  So we had to check it out.  

 

There were quite a few people hiking up the mountain trail.  When we got to the midway part, there was a tea-house.  It sold different teas, sandwiches, and pastries.  Agnes Lake was an emerald color, very different from the other lakes we had seen so far.

 A good view of  the tea house in the corner of this picture.

From here we climbed up a very steep mountain "Big Beehive".  There is a great picture of it on our way down the hike that will be posted later.  The "inukshuk" is something that has been around for a long while.  It became world famous with the Vancouver Olympics in 2012.  They used it like a cairn, marking your path on trails.

 The girls were speedy up the switchbacks and got a picture of my lagging behind with dad being supportive and going behind me to make sure I was ok.

Corie and Cadie at the top of Big Beehive.  Great view of Lake Louise below.

It was really amazing how creamy the lake looked.  And it was such an amazing turquoise color.  There were several canoes in the lake and they looked like ants on the water as we were so high above them.

 my panoramic shot  

 We decided that this view of Lake Louise looks more like a wing of an airplane...

 Cadie had on mint nail polish and it is the same color of the lake.  We called it turquoise, but I guess it is more mint color.

                           

                                   On our way down the mountain we saw some glaciers behind us.

Corie and Scott wanted to go climb up the bowl that was behind Lake Agnes.  So Cadie and I hiked back to the tea house, and let them do the extra mile hike.

It really was a beautiful hike.  We were amazed at how many people were at the mid-way point, the tea house.  There were so many people hiking up while we were going down.  It was incredible how many people were hiking the trail, as it wasn't an easy hike.  That tea house must lure them all up.  Mirror Lake is in between Louise Lake and Lake Agnes.  Behind the girls is Big Beehive, which we climbed to the top.

This view is from down at the bottom by Lake Louise.  You can see Upper Beehive; it is the rounded mountain right in the middle.  It doesn't look too high from the bottom.  But we really did climb up high.  The elevation gain was over 3,000 ft. The gain up to the tea house was 1280 ft. and up to Big Beehive was 1770 ft.

We slept in on Thursday morning, packed, hitched up the trailer and headed up to Jasper National Park.  We stayed at the Wabasso Campground which was just a few miles south of the city of Jasper.  It was only a 3 hour drive.  Along the way we saw some beautiful lakes and glaciers.

This is Bow River with a huge glacier behind it, just different angles.

Same lake, different glacier.

Jasper National Park

 Two different days and two different signs... One going in and one going out.  

We set up camp on Thursday and then drove up to Jasper and walked around the town, sent some postcards and bought some groceries.  One of the things that we found out by going out of the country is that you don't have cell phone service or internet.  So we were phoneless on the trip.  The only thing our iphones were good for was taking great pictures...  We came back to the trailer and played some games.  Cadie's favorite was old maid.  Dad's favorite was scum.  Corie and I just played to have fun...

Friday we drove down to the Columbia Icefields.  We first stopped by Athabasca Falls which was on the way.

There was a small trail that went around these falls.  This is a stair path that led to the river at the bottom of the falls.  Cadie enhanced it a bit with an app.  But it was still very pretty.

There was another cool waterfall on the way to the Icefields.  It was right before the construction - where they are building an overlook over the mountain.  It is called Tangled Creek.  Cadie and Corie hiked up to the ledge in the middle.

We had to hike about a mile to get to the glacier.  25 years ago we walked on the glacier and under it.  Now you can just walk up to it, unless you take a bus tour that will drive you to a groomed area in the middle of the glacier where you can walk around and even fill up your water bottle with fresh glacial water.  That is a definite must next time.

Athabasca Glacier  is as thick as the Eiffel Tower is tall.  The glacier is more than 3 miles long and is 300-900 feet thick. It moves down the mountain about 2-3 centimeters per day.  And because of global warming it is receding 2-3 meters per year.  It was pretty cool with the winds blowing.

There was a small patch of the glacier that had fallen off into the river.  You could see the blue color of the glacier.  Underneath all the ice it is blue as it has compacted over the years and there is no oxygen.

On our way back to the campground we saw some wild mountain goats.  These were the only animals we saw in Jasper.

Saturday we packed up and left about 5am. It took us 10 hours to drive back  down to Glacier National Park.  We went a different route than we came.  

A beautiful sunrise...

We drove home through British Columbia. Kootenay National Park had a forest fire and we even saw a few places where it was still burning. Because it was so much lower in elevation than Banff NP there was lots of fog, miles and miles of fog.

 

 British Columbia was very different from Alberta.  Both have beautiful scenery just very different.  We even saw an LDS church building in a small town along the highway.  When we got to the border, it was a bit different from going into Canada. The lines were longer, and some of the posts were closed.  We waited about an hour before we were able to get through.  There were cameras all over the place.  There were 3 different lines to go in.  One was closed, one was short, and the other one was long.  So i talked dad into moving into the short one.  But before he did, I had to make sure that the signs didn't say anything about restrictions.

I don't remember what the signs above each lane said, but it didn't have any restrictions.  So dad pulled over to the shorter line.  About 5 minutes later a man walked to us and pointed to a little handwritten sign that said no trailers.  He told us that there is a weird bend in the lane so it doesn't work for trailers.  So he let us move into another lane.  We were waiting to go into the far left lane, when he came back again and told us that that lane was now closed, but they would be opening the middle lane momentarily.  So we pulled in straight and waited for the green light to move ahead.  

There were probably 20 cameras in each lane.  As we pulled forward, you could see the flashes going off.  You knew that they had microphones recording what we were saying too.  They took our passports, looked as us all, and said "Welcome to the United States".

We pulled into Glacer NP about 3 in the afternoon.  Just enough time to set the trailer up, go kayaking and cook hot dogs and smores over the fire.  We drove over to Lake McDonald and found that it was only $9 per person an hour to kayak in a two man boat.  Lake Louise it was $50 per person.  We kayaked for about an hour and a half, and because it was closing time, the guy was nice and only charged us for an hour.  The lake was so smooth; it looked like glass sometimes.  Because it was early evening, there weren't too many people out.  We had fun watching Corie and Cadie go in circles until they finally learned out to row together.

Our drive home was uneventful, other than we stopped in this little town in Montana and ate McDonalds and we waited in line for about 15 minutes.  Then another 30 minutes for our food.  So rather than getting home at 8pm like we planned, we got home at 9.