That's A Paddlin'

As of my 57th birthday (late June of this year), I had never, ever set foot or sat butt in a canoe in my life. At least I don't think I had. And if I'm wrong then surely I have not participated in the paddling part. I mean, why on Earth would I, really? What purpose would that serve me? And where would I even be finding a canoe in my life or travels? I mean I've ridden in plenty of boats in my time roaming around this planet...but a canoe? I don't think so.

Now, I guess if you really wanted to, you could maybe make a case that my trip into the Mbamba swamp in Uganda in 2023 took place in a sort of canoe but those boats were either pole driven or fitted with an outboard motor. In my small-minded view of things, canoes have paddles and not poles and are powered by people, not motors.

If there was ever a place that I would consider a canoe ride appropriate and fitting for the place, it would be Canada. I have no idea why. Canoes were used in places as far flung as what are today the Netherlands and Nigeria like ten or more millennia ago. Canadians (or people who were living there before Canada was Canada) are by no means the inventors of the canoe. But the Great White North just seemed like the place to paddle a canoe for the first time. So when we started planning this trip and there was an opportunity to take a canoe ride where paddling was required and supervision was offered...I was in! All in! Let's break another first-time barrier. 

Isn't that what this whole thing is about, after all?

Canoes for rent. Moraine Lake. Banff National Park. The top picture is Lake Louise.

There are many, many places to rent a canoe in the Canadian Rockies. You can spend $100 CAD and get an hour's paddling in at Emerald Lake in Yoho National Park. Or if you feel like spending a little more, you can get the same amount of time for a cool $160 CAD at Moraine Lake. We didn't take either of those options. If we were going to be canoeing for the first time, we wanted someone watching over us and we wanted a bit of purpose. Plus, it cost just a bit less we'd be OK with that.

Our solution? A guided interpretive tour of the wetlands alongside the mighty (well, it becomes mighty a lot further along anyway...) Columbia River. We figured we'd go find some birds along the edges of the water and in the vegetation growing in the wetlands and if we just happened to have some company in the form of some other canoe-ers and more importantly a trained guide to help us out if anything went wrong, well then all the better. Plus at a cost of just $59 CAD per person for a whole two hours, we'd get something we wanted without paying an arm and a leg. 

Columbia River Paddle out of Invermere, if you must know.

And not that $160 CAD is an arm or a leg or anything.

So how was my first time in a canoe? Honestly, I don't know. Because I still haven't been in a canoe.

On the water on the might Columbia River. But not in a canoe.

So we get to Columbia River Paddle a little early for our guided wetlands tour and we check in. We are the only two signed up. Nobody else. No other people. No numbers. But still guided. One guide (Dominick...and guessing on the spelling) for the two of us. Just the two of us. Cool! 

Ever been in a canoe before? Nope. Figured we'd learn. Ever been in a kayak? Nope to that too. No real experience rowing or paddling any human powered craft ever. Total rookies. Give us life vests and tell us what to do and we'll hope for the best. And no, this is not actually a transcript.

After some quick discussion, it was decided a canoe was probably not for us. Maybe a kayak would be better. Less "tippy". And yes, that was the actual word used. Tippy. We don't want tippy. Kayak sounds fine. No tippy.

That dream of canoeing in Canada? Dead right there and then. At least for 2025. Stupid safety and tippy-ness. Maybe some other time. These blog posts about this trip seem to contain a running list of future Canadian Rockies activities. Maybe canoeing should be added to the list. Maybe.

So we kayaked. In the wetlands. In Canada. On the Columbia River that we followed for a day in Oregon about seven years beforehand. We sat in this plastic shell of a boat and got pushed into the water. We stayed afloat. We got used to the paddling action. We learned how to stop and turn and how to not tip the boat over or anywhere close. We traveled past reeds and under a bridge. We saw some bald eagles and plenty of red-winged blackbirds and heard a lot more birds than we saw. 

And yes, I do know that I can do this in northern Virginia or Maryland or Washington, DC. I know I can go rent a kayak and paddle along the Potomac River or on the Chesapeake Bay or somewhere like that. I know I can pass by wetlands and hear birds. Heck, I even know a spot or two where I can find some nesting bald eagles (hello, Dyke Marsh Wildlife Preserve). Maybe not bald eagles nesting right on the water but it's not too far off. 

Why does this sort of thing even get put in a travel blog when I can do exactly the same thing minutes from my home but choose not to?

Good question.

But seriously...are you looking at the pictures I'm posting here? Those mountains. That crystal clear and super, super calm water. And besides all that, the sense that time is standing still. The idea that work doesn't matter because it's hundreds of miles away and completely inconsequential right at that moment. There's a fee proposal to review? Who cares. Not me. Not on that water. Not beside those mountains. 

Our guide, Dominick (top). And a beaver dam (bottom). Not finding THAT in northern Virginia. 

This whole paddling thing, by the way...not so tough on really calm water with like zero wind and even less current. Maybe that's an obvious statement. I think for our first time in a kayak, I was grateful for the situation. It allowed me to relax and gaze at the Rockies and the few birds and especially the bald eagle nest that eventually revealed two very, very large chicks we saw without worrying about anything else like staying upright or fighting the river. 

I am pretty confident that I didn't lose much being in a kayak rather than a canoe. Yes, sure, there's this romantic image I had of being in some mountain lake (I know the Columbia River is not a lake) and moving my decidedly-not-invented-in-Canada-but-somehow-very-Canadian canoe through the water with some effortless strokes of my paddle. Do I regret the kayak? Maybe just a little bit. I'll put the canoe on my list for next time and I'll stick to my convictions next time. Probably.

Now...when's my next kayaking trip? 

The second bald eagle in the middle photo (the one in the nest) is the baby. It's a pretty big baby.

Even The Losers

Our plan for the six Parks Canada National Parks that we visited this summer just west of Calgary was pretty simple. New day, new park. We picked a day to spend in a particular Park and we were pretty much all in for at least that day. Whatever we could figure out worth doing in the Park du jour, that's what we did. All of it. Total immersion. Total focus. We had a Banff day, a Kootenay day (or maybe day and a half), a Jasper Day and a Revelstoke / Glacier day. 

And yes, I know that's only five Parks. I can count.

So we did it that way for all of the Parks except Yoho National Park. And because we did it that way, Yoho had the very real possibility of being totally lost as a Park experience. We could very well have come back from Canada having just skipped Yoho. That wasn't our original intent. But it's all because we were losers before we even got on the plane to head to Canada. 

It wasn't supposed to be that way with Yoho National Park. We had big plans here. We centered our original agenda for that Park's day around a trip to Lake O'Hara and it looked like there were one or two other gems to spend time at. Yes, that's right, we picked lakes as the central activity in two different National Parks, after doing the same exact thing in Banff National Park with Lake Louise, Moraine Lake and maybe a couple of other bodies of water. Lake O'Hara sounds awesome. If I thought visitation to Moraine Lake was limited, Lake O'Hara seemed like it was even more secluded and tourist-free and therefore (in my small mind's eye) more desirable. Much more desirable. 

To get to Lake Louise and Moraine Lake in Banff National Park, I sat on a website for about 45 minutes with about 50,000 other people ahead of me to get some bus tickets. Lake O'Hara tickets don't work that way. It's not so easy with Yoho. Parks Canada conducts a lottery where over a period of three weeks, you can pay to submit entries with dates and times you'd like to visit Lake O'Hara. In the subsequent two weeks, entries are drawn at random and spots on buses are offered to those whose lottery tickets are drawn. We waited all two weeks for our one entry to be picked and we got nothing. No dice. No bus to Lake O'Hara. 

Can you get there some other way? Yes, you can. Not by getting last minute tickets saved for two days before you want to go like Lake Louise and Moraine Lake. Not by paying a private tour operator to take you there like Lake Louise and Moraine Lake. By hiking. 11 kilometers each way in bear country. No thanks. We lost. No visit to Lake O'Hara in 2025. Not for us. Like that, our Yoho plans were crushed.

Natural Bridge, Yoho National Park.

Maybe.

We reorganized. We stuffed parts of Yoho into the beginnings or ends of days when we were visiting other Parks. Was that ideal for us? Not at all. Our experience in Yoho would be totally dependent upon our ability to squeeze that Park into days when we already had a full plate of things to do. And it would also depend on some luck. And we already know that we weren't feeling lucky about Yoho after the whole lottery incident.

Our targets? Emerald Lake. Natural Bridge. Takakkaw Falls. Meeting of the Waters Confluent. Yes, that last one is a mouthful.

The luck we needed? Parking lots with empty parking spaces. We drove past the access road for Emerald Lake on the way to our hotel when we first landed in Canada. There is a sign by the side of the road advertising the condition of the parking lot near the lake. It said full. That was not the last time we saw this sign saying there were no parking spaces next to the Lake. We'd need to guess correctly on how early we'd need to get there in the morning or just get lucky later in the day when things had thinned out a bit. One of those two.

Our revised plan was this: schedule a drive to Emerald Lake and Natural Bridge early in the morning of Banff day and tack the Meeting of the Waters Confluent onto the end of one of our Kootenay days with a hope that we could make it to Takakkaw Falls in the morning on our return drive back to Calgary. Complicated enough? Squeezing in. I'm telling you. We definitely needed luck, particularly at Takakkaw Falls. If we got there too late on that last day and the parking lot was full, we'd have no other chance.

Emerald Lake. Yoho National Park.

We got right to it in Yoho on our first full day in Canada. Banff day was day one but because we planned on squeezing in Emerald Lake before doing what we had scheduled in Banff, Yoho was actually the first Park we intentionally visited on this trip. We just needed a parking space. We guessed at a 6:45 a.m. departure time from our hotel in Golden, BC. That would get us at Emerald Lake at about 7:30. Early enough? We'd see.

The sign on the access road said "yes" to availability and sure enough, when we rolled up to the edge of Emerald Lake, we found the parking lot about half full. Score! The first part of our Yoho plan worked. And spoiler alert and so I don't have to blow-by-blow the suspense of the rest of Yoho, so did everything else. We made it to all the limited parts of Yoho that we planned. What was potentially a throwaway ended up being anything but. 

I'm also going to skip Natural Bridge and the Confluent in this post. Natural Bridge is on the way to (or from, depending on your perspective) Emerald Lake and it's worth a stop for sure. Same with the Meeting of the Waters on the way to Takakkaw Falls. Dip your hands in the water. At both spots.

Emerald Lake is incredible. The color of the water is literally emerald green and the setting in the woods is so secluded and scenic. It's amazing. There's a trail that leads down the far side of the Lake and I assume that path wraps around the entire Lake to the hotel (which is really a series of cabins) at the side of the Lake closest to the parking lot. It must be a gorgeous hike through the woods. We probably made it down one half of one long side of the Lake (the hotel side which is not super wooded to a point) before turning back. Hey...we had other things to do that day and we are not super-committed hikers on normal days.

The color of that water...

Here's what I don't get about Emerald Lake. Having visited Emerald Lake and then Lake Louise in the same day, it is difficult for me to understand why so many people flock to Lake Louise. So sure, there's a huge hotel there and there's a shuttle bus service that takes people there all day, every day in the summer. But there could be the exact same shuttle bus thing set up at Emerald Lake and there's already a hotel there. I do understand that the amount of people who we found at Lake Louise would totally overwhelm Emerald Lake. That's not really what I'm confused by.

It's this. 

If what I read in guide books and on Parks Canada's website is true, it is basically impossible to park your car at Lake Louise after about 6 o'clock in the morning. I bet Lake Louise is beautiful when there are way fewer people there but why take a chance on fighting for a parking spot there so early when you can go to Emerald Lake and just roll up at 7:30 and park with no competition. And probably for an hour or so after as well. I'll take finding a spot two hours later in the morning at Emerald Lake with probably fewer people at the Lake itself over getting up and setting up before dawn to get to Lake Louise. And for sure if I'm staying at hotel at a lake, I'm staying at Emerald Lake without a second thought.

It was misty the morning we visited Emerald Lake so I can't provide a true comparison to somewhere like Moraine Lake or Lake Louise which we viewed without mist. What it would have looked like in the mid-day (or morning sun, for that matter)? Can't say. I know it was cool and colorful and mysterious when we visited. And that was just fine with us. It was magical. Maybe we need to hit it later in the day on our next Canadian Rockies trip. Assuming we can find parking.

The Meeting of the Waters Confluent. Yoho National Park.

We followed the same sort of script for Takakkaw Falls as we put together for Emerald Lake. Up early. No breakfast at the hotel. Yes breakfast and coffee at Tim Hortons (no apostrophe). And on the road at time which we hoped would be good enough to get a parking spot near the Falls. Because Takakkaw Falls was on our last day in the Rockies agenda, we hedged our bets a bit and got up a bit earlier than for Emerald Lake.

A 6:15ish departure would get us to the Falls about an hour later. And yes, at 7:15 in the morning, there are plenty of spots in the parking lot near Takakkaw Falls. And there probably would be for another hour or maybe two. Guessing a bit on that last part.

I will admit I'm not much of a waterfalls guy. I will forever be impressed by the power of Niagara Falls, especially from the Canadian side. I was underwhelmed by Victoria Falls on the Zambia-Zimbabwe border. And I guess Oregon's famous Multnomah Falls was impressive enough but I've been to my fair share of waterfalls which are just a trickle to a stream of water falling over a cliff or the side of a mountain. Maybe I'm un-romantic about waterfalls. 

Takakkaw Falls for me is on the Niagara end of the spectrum. Let me explain.

First of all, the setting for these falls (or is it this falls?) is about as gorgeous as you can get. I mean, it's the Canadian Rockies for crying out loud and if it wasn't clear from my post about Banff, I'm pretty darned impressed by the Canadian Rockies.

Second, it's all glacier water. Does that make it more spectacular to look at or hear or feel? Probably not. But as a concept, I'm more on board with glacier water waterfalls than other types. Plus if I actually swallow some accidentally, I'm probably better off than imbibing some Niagara water. And yes, the water is in the air a good distance from the Falls. When we got to the parking lot, I felt it raining. It wasn't rain. Apparently my Tims wasn't kicking in quite yet.

Third. It's tall and there's a good volume of water coming over the Falls. It's about twice as tall as Multnomah Falls and over three times as tall as Niagara. This is a serious waterfall with some serious noise and some serious spray. If I truly am un-romantic about waterfalls, it's because I probably appreciate the power of a lot of water falling from a great height and I don't get that at every waterfall. Takakkaw Falls has all that.

But the real reason I loved our experience at Takakkaw Falls is that you can walk pretty much to the bottom of the falls and feel, hear, smell and, yes, even taste the power of those Falls up close and personal. We visited in early July and it was cold. Like not t-shirt weather at all (I was wearing a t-shirt). But the crispness of the air and water in the early morning sunshine was just amazing. It was so worth the less than a mile or so walk from the parking lot to the base of the Falls through the pines. 

Lake O'Hara? Who needs it? 

Although honestly, I still want to go. There is a sign to Lake O'Hara on the Trans-Canada Highway that we passed about nine times and every time we passed it, it was like it was taunting us for not winning the bus tickets lottery. Oh well...put that on the list for next time along with the sunnier trip to Emerald Lake.

Great waterfalls deserve portrait pictures. 

Did our Yoho experience suffer because we broke it up into four sites over three separate days? Maybe. But probably not really. 

When we were done with our up close visit to Takakkaw Falls, we did a quick search for some birds. HAVE to look for the birds. I was hoping to spot a variable thrush, which our Merlin app had picked up on the way to the Falls. Like our experience in most wooded areas of the planet which we have visited to look for birds, what we hear far outstrips what we see. We got nothing. 

But we did have a fleeting but brand new birding experience in Yoho. 

One of our great hopes for this trip was that we would find some of the migrating warblers that we see near our home in Virginia in the spring and fall living out their lives in their Canadian summer-ing grounds. By and large, we were not super successful. Despite the pretty good look we got at a yellow-rumped warbler on the edge of Banff National Park and the many, many yellow warblers in Calgary's Inglewood Bird Sanctuary, we mostly heard way more than we saw. And legitimately, it's often this way with warblers, which are super small and camouflage well and will not sit still.

But at Emerald Lake, we managed to find a Wilson's warbler, a little yellow bird with a black cap on its head, and we were able to follow his flitting for maybe 10 minutes or so. It was not one of the most spectacular bird sightings we've had in our lives but it was good enough for a new (for us) warbler species. As a measure of how poor this sighting was, my best picture of this bird is below.

Super exciting? Actually yes. Any time we see a new bird species and it's not like all brown like sparrows, it's a genuine thrill. I have no idea when we will ever see a Wilson's warbler again, so for me, yes this was super exciting. 

It is difficult to truly separate the different Parks in the Canadian Rockies that man has decided to draw boundaries between. It's a completely arbitrary mapping that makes no difference to the beauty of this place. Nonetheless, someone did that and I am (to a great extent) abiding by those artificial boundaries as a measure of judging the quality of parts of the natural landscape that we explored in late June and early July.

Yoho was incredible. The mountains and the water were just as stunning as we found in Banff National Park, even if we weren't able to concentrate our time in Yoho quite the way we did in other Parks. If nothing else, Yoho gave us both something memorable on this trip and a couple of spots to explore further on a second Canadian Rockies trip. Like we don't have all sorts of other places on our list. 

Blue Canadian Rockies

So we finally made it to Canada. 

A four day workweek, an early Friday morning flight out of Dulles and we were on the ground in Calgary at about noon. Love that two hour time difference going west! We cleared customs and immigration quickly (not difficult to get into Canada) and then hopped in a rental car and started driving. A quick stop for lunch and we were off headed west towards the six Parks Canada National Parks we planned to spend the next five plus days in. 

Lunch was poutine. I mean...what else would it be?

About 60 minutes later straight west along the Trans-Canada Highway, some pretty large mountains started showing up as a continuous wall of jagged peaks ahead of us. Welcome to the Canadian Rocky Mountains!!!! This is what we traveled to western Canada to see and breathe and live for the better part of a week.

Our gateway to the Canadian Rockies was Banff National Park. It was the first Park we would pass through on the way to (in order) Yoho, Kootenay, Jasper, Glacier and Mount Revelstoke National Parks. We spent more time driving and stopping in Banff than any of the other five, including spending a morning and early afternoon shopping and eating (more poutine!!) in the Park's namesake town and making a couple of birdwatching stops at Vermilion Lakes just north of the town.

That drive through that Park! What an introduction to our week! 

I've been to the Rocky Mountains in the United States a few times: 2001, 2011, 2018, 2020, maybe one other year but I don't think so. If I can credibly say that I wasn't that impressed by a mountain range that features 53 peaks of 14,000 feet or more in the state of Colorado alone, that's the statement I'd like to make here. I wasn't that impressed. They are not the Andes or the Alps or even the Bitterroots. I just don't think they look that mountain-y. I even looked back at my pictures that I took in 2020 in Rocky Mountain National Park to be sure and yep...not that impressed. Call me crazy.

But the Canadian Rockies based on our time in Banff and beyond? Now these are some mountains. They are far, far more mountain-y (yes, that's twice with that word). The peaks are sharp; they stand apart from each other much more distinctly; and the slopes are ragged and jagged sometimes and so flat in other locations. They are in fact so flat in some spots that it honestly looks like some giant creature stuck its hands in the planet and pulled a giant chunk of the surface of the earth up into a 45 degree slope and left it there. 

And apparently, I'm right about the whole thing: the Rockies in Canada and the United States are not the same mountains. They were formed at different times in the Earth's history by different tectonic action. Sure they are connected today, but geologically they are completely distinct. That makes them different. And the Canadian Rockies had one other thing that the American Rockies didn't: glaciers. It is the work of glaciers that gives the mountains in Canada their shape and appearance as the slow flows of ice have ripped into the mountains over the millennia that they have worked their magic. 

And they come at you in waves as you drive. More and more and more, sometime made even better and more dramatic by the tunnels that form the wildlife crossings over the highway. The tunnel constricts your view and then frames the mountains beyond as you drive through.

The other thing that made an instant impression on the drive: the water. I can't remember ever being impressed by the color of a river or stream or brook or whatever size body of water you want to pick that's not an ocean. But I'm telling you, the green color of the water running by the side of the road through Banff National Park was otherworldly. It was stunning. And this is from just driving down the highway at 110 or so kilometers per hour. I've never seen anything like it.

Apparently, it's something called rock flour that makes the water that color. The glaciers grind the rock of the mountains beneath them into fine powder that when dissolved or suspended in the rivers prevents the transmission of the parts of the electromagnetic spectrum which are not green and blue. And since all the water running through Banff is pretty much glacial melt, that rock flour makes all the water there strikingly green-blue in color. I swear I will never forget that color.

It is perhaps appropriate that I was instantly fascinated by the color of the water in Banff because the centerpieces of our agenda for that Park were two of the area's most famous mountain lakes: Lake Louise and Moraine Lake. And of course, we were all in!

Here's where things get interesting. There are several ways to access Lake Louise. You can drive close to the lakeshore but apparently that parking lot fills up by sunrise (that would be about 5 a.m. in the summer). You can stay at the ultra-expensive Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise (anything with the word "chateau" in its name has to be ultra-expensive) but that's...well...ultra-expensive. Walking is certainly an option, but definitely not a quick option. Or you can take a shuttle bus run by Parks Canada or a private tour operator. Tickets are limited. 

If you want to take a Parks Canada shuttle, most of the tickets are available mid-Spring (April 16 this year) with the rest being released two days before the date of the shuttle run. We got tickets on the initial release date. I signed on two minutes after the top of the hour and there were about 50,000 people in line ahead of me. It took about 45 minutes to get through that line but I got some tickets for mid-afternoon (NOT when I wanted them). Tickets from Parks Canada are cheap at $8 CAD. Some private operators were charging $125 CAD when we got the but departure point.

And if you want to get to Moraine Lake? Walk or bus. No cars allowed near Moraine Lake. The $8 bus ticket gets you to both Lake Louise and Moraine Lake. Pretty sweet deal if you have the time. We'll talk about that later.

Lake Louise, Banff National Park. Not a great picture looking into the afternoon sun.

I can't tell you how excited I was to visit Lake Louise. This was one of my top sights on my pre-trip must see list. The payoff here was going to be amazing, I just knew it. After we secured our shuttle tickets we debated between going to Moraine Lake or Lake Louise first and ultimately we decided Lake Louise was the one we had to do first. That way, if somehow our afternoon trip went slower than planned, we'd make sure we saw the best one.

What a nightmare! This place was so packed that it was pretty much completely non-enjoyable. Was it beautiful? Well, it could have been. It is admittedly gorgeously sited and framed so well by the mountains and the color of the water is just an amazing dark green. But so many people. It was difficult to move around and to take pictures and just in general enjoy the place. I have a small list of big disappointments that includes Kyoto's Arashiyama Bamboo Grove, most of New Zealand and about the entire city of Rome. Lake Louise is now on that list. We spent maybe 15 minutes there. Maybe.

Moraine Lake, on the other hand? Amazing. So peaceful. Nestled in the mountains with snow on their slopes in late June. Very, very few people. No hotel guests. No people who drove to Lake Louise parking lot. And (and I'm speculating here) no people who only wanted to see Lake Louise and skipped Moraine Lake. It made all the difference. In a big way.

Moraine Lake, Banff National Park. I don't know how many versions of the top photograph I took.

We spent about an hour at Moraine Lake. We walked along the edge of the long and narrow lake almost its entire length in the pine (and other types of trees, I'm sure...) forest. We climbed over rocks and walked over streams feeding the lake. We spent time gazing out over the water and contemplating how amazing the luminous blue layer was that seemed to be on top of the water (these pictures are real and unfiltered; the water is really that color). We slowed down. We didn't have to dodge people or wait for people to move so we could enjoy the view. It was likely the most peaceful experience we had all week. It was just perfect.

And can I say...thank God we did this last. If we had done it first, I know that we would have rushed it so we could have spent more time at Lake Louise. Sometimes decisions that seem unimportant on vacation end up being huge. I would not have wanted to have cut short our time on that lakeshore to get to tourist central over at Lake Louise. We got the beauty of that place along with a sense of calm.

We also got some idea of the power of nature.

There is a giant pile of rocks at the parking lot end of Moraine Lake. You can climb on top of it. We didn't, preferring to parlay our afternoon bus ticket into our walk down the lakeside. The rock pile looks manmade. It's not. It's the result of a centuries-old rock avalanche or maybe several avalanches. The full-size pine tree trunks floating in the water at that same end of the lake are also the result of avalanches over the winter season. It's amazing the destructive force that these avalanches have, whether they be snow or rock sliding down a mountainside all of a sudden. There are signs all over the Canadian Rockies advertising the danger of avalanches. I'd love to see one in person. From a distance obviously. 

So about that time thing...it does take a while to do all this with Parks Canada on the shuttle. We had a bus slot between 3 and 4 p.m. We arrived 10 minutes before 3 but waited 20 minutes for the bus to get there. We hit Lake Louise, realized it wasn't for us and joined the Moraine Lake line at about 3:40 p.m. A trip to Moraine, a nice leisurely walk, back in line for a bus and then arrival back at the bus stop had us getting off the bus at a bit after 6 p.m. All told, about 3 hours and 15 minutes. And that's with 15 minutes maximum at Lake Louise. Not quick.

More Moraine Lake.

Moraine Lake wasn't the last lake we visited in Banff National Park. No sir! We did some others without shuttle buses. There are a string of lakes in the Park on the way to Jasper National Park to the north and west. We stopped by a few on the way back from Jasper including the unbelievable swimming-pool-blue Peyto Lake, which is visible from an overlook after maybe a half mile or three quarters of a mile sometimes steep walk from the nearby parking lot. Peyto Lake is shown below and it really is that color of blue. Before you go explaining away that color as just like a backyard swimming pool, remember some pool bottoms are painted light blue. No paint at Peyto.

I supposed you can walk down to Peyto Lake. I don't know how you do that. I'm sure it's more than a half mile plus from a parking lot. Despite the color of Peyto Lake, Moraine was my favorite Banff lake. We found a connection that was deeper than we got at any other lake on this trip. That walk was definitely my favorite non-strenuous walk of the trip. Who knows....maybe Moraine is the same color as Peyto when viewed from above at a great distance. I don't think I'll ever know and it really doesn't matter to me. Moraine Lake wins Banff National Park for me. That and all those incredible mountains.

Peyto Lake. Banff National Park.

But Banff had one more surprise.

One thing that we didn't see a lot of in Banff National Park was wildlife. We expected a lot of deer and elk all over the place and maybe some bighorn sheep on the mountains or hills and at least one or two bears. On the bear side of things, we definitely had a preference for grizzlies, but heck, we'd settle for black bears. We expected wildlife pretty much like we saw in Yellowstone National Park in 2020 minus the bison. 

We got almost nothing. We saw two deer the day we devoted to exploring the town of Banff and most of the National Park of the same name and, sure, we found about maybe a half dozen bighorn sheep towards the eastern edge of the Park as we cruised down the Highway at about 110 back to Calgary as we exited the Parks but that was it. No mammals really to speak of. That was probably the most disappointing aspect of this whole trip, because it wasn't just in Banff.

But we did see a Clark's nutcracker. It's a bird. And funnily enough, we also saw our first and best sighting of this bird at Moraine Lake.

The Clark's nutcracker is not a new species of bird for us. We saw at least one at Crater Lake in Oregon in 2018 (there's a picture of one on my Crater Lake blog post). It's not a particularly remarkable bird to look at. But we didn't know its story before we visited Canada. And its story is pretty incredible. 

Clark's nutcracker. Appropriately with a nut between its beak.

The Clark's nutcracker lives around a species of tree called the whitebark pine. It's not the only type of tree that the Clark's nutcracker lives near but the opposite is true, meaning the whitebark pine only lives near the Clark's nutcracker. And that's because that bird is pretty much responsible for the entire survival of the whitebark pine.

Here's the story we were told (which totally checks out in an independent fact check courtesy of the United States National Park Service). Like most or all pine trees out there, the whitebark pine's seed are contained within the namesake pine cones that grow all over the tree. When the cones are on the tree, the seeds are viable, but when they fall off the tree, the seeds inside the cones spill out and lose their viability fairly quickly. The cones of the whitebark pine don't open on the tree, just when they fall off, but the Clark's nutcracker has just the right length and strength beak to dig into the cone and grab some seeds. 

The Clark's nutcracker doesn't eat all the seeds it extracts from the whitebark pine's cones. It actually plants some in the ground. Sometimes near the parent tree and sometimes far away. This planting behavior is pretty much the only way new whitebark pines will grow. All because of a loud bird that lives in the forests. 

We didn't learn this story from any sort of display in a museum or signboard at Moraine Lake. We were on a guided hike the day after visiting Banff when we told our guide about our birdwatching hobby and the birds we had seen so far on our trip, including the Clark's nutcracker. In response to that comment, he dropped this story on us which is quite frankly just amazing. Who knew? It helps to talk with people sometimes on vacation. You get the strangest information sometimes. 

Clark's nutcracker. Moraine Lake. I'll never forget that story. I can't wait to pass it on.

Mountains. Rivers. Lakes. Clark's nutcracker. That's our Banff National Park story for 2025. It was both the first and last Parks Canada National Park we set foot in on this trip. Now it's the first one in this blog. 

Yoho next, I'm thinking.

One last look at mountains and pines. Banff National Park.

O Canada

Before I hit the "Publish" button on this post today, I had written exactly one piece in the last 12 years about time that I had spent in Canada. That post was in 2017, and we were really only in Canada because that's where our cruise ship to Alaska was departing from. 

Where did all the other posts about Canada go to, you might ask? Where are all the words and paragraphs about the country that shares the longest land border with the United States of America?

There aren't any. 

Know why? Because I've never intentionally planned a vacation to Canada. Never. I went to Montreal for a couple of Thanksgivings with my parents in high school but that wasn't me planning the vacation. I just went along, having been afforded no real choice in the matter. And sure, I've wandered to Toronto a few times since I turned 18 to see a basketball game and go to a baseball game (that wasn't really the intent but that's what I did) and go to the Toronto Zoo, but those didn't count really either. Nor really do the less than 24 hours we spent in Vancouver in 2017. I mean, if the boat had departed from Seattle, I would still not have visited Vancouver.

That trip to the Zoo, by the way, was the only time I have ever spent the night in a car in a parking lot. In the middle of winter. In Toronto. It was actually one of the warmest nights I've ever spent in my life. I had blankets and slept in my clothes, what can I say?

The first of two Tim Hortons we visited in Golden, BC (population 3,986-ish). The other Tims is better.

So all that stops today because here is a post that's completely and unabashedly about Canada. Why, you may ask? Well...because right after my 57th birthday at the end of June, I finally took a trip to Canada that I planned. Not for a day on the way to catch a boat. Not for an accidental or intentional weekend away. A real, honest to God vacation in Canada. Eight nights! And behold: there will be blog posts about Canada this year. 

And maybe, just maybe...next year as well (our next Canada trip is already booked!).

Why Canada in 2025? Well, I guess it started when it came time to add a fourth weeklong trip to our 2025 travel itinerary, I thought Rocky Mountains and back to Yellowstone National Park. But...I didn't really want to spend time in the center of the United States. I mean, not really. Not this year. Then I had a thought. Or an inspiration maybe. I remembered the Rockies actually go all the way north of the border and into Canada. So I looked to the Great White North and found our fourth trip. Just like that, we decided to go to Canada. 

Was it just like the Rocky Mountains in the United States and Yellowstone National Park? Nope! No it wasn't. It was like the Canadian Rockies. They are different places in so many ways. We'll get to all that just soon enough including all sorts of stuff about mountains, birds, bears, kayaking, hiking, waterfalls, early sunrises, late sunsets, pine trees, trout, sheep, flowers, chairs, lakes, glaciers, crazy-colored water and lots and lots of French fries with gravy and maybe some Tim Hortons coffee with a Canadian maple donut or two (so good...). OK, so maybe I won't cover all of that. We'll see.

And as an aside...what's the deal with apostrophes at Tim Hortons? I thought the place was founded by a dude named Tim Horton and because they are his stores, the "s" after Horton is is some sort of possessive denotation. Yes? Or no? Because there's no apostrophe. Also when they shorten the name to Tims, it's also missing an apostrophe. So confused here. Why isn't it "Tim Horton's" and "Tim's"?

Avalanche warning sign in Yoho National Park. Lots of avalanche signs in the Canadian Rockies.

Our entry point for this trip was Calgary, Alberta. I suppose Calgary is likely on the plains of Canada but hop in a car and drive an hour or maybe a bit more west and you'll be on the edge or really into the Rockies depending on how fast you feel like rolling down the Trans-Canada Highway. I'm not sure Canadians are big speeders. I felt like we were most often the fastest car on the road and I by no means usually have a lead foot. 

When we visited Rocky Mountain National Park in 2020, we flew to Denver, stopped there for a night but did literally nothing else except eat dinner and sleep and then split for the mountains the next morning. We did something similar when we visited Yellowstone later that same year: flew to Salt Lake City, landed and then drove straight through Idaho to Jackson, Wyoming.

We didn't do that with Calgary on this trip. After six nights in eastern British Columbia, we spent the last two nights of this vacation in downtown Calgary. And as luck would have it, we checked in to our hotel in that city the day before the start of the Calgary Stampede, which is like the biggest event of the year and it's not even close in Southern Alberta.

Let me say this about the Calgary Stampede and the city of Calgary in general: it's awesome!

Calgary Stampede parade. Shania Twain was the grand marshal.

I have to say that the skyline of Calgary is not much to look at. It's not New York or Chicago or Los Angeles (yes...LA has a skyline!!) or Las Vegas or some of our more famous and iconic cities in the United States. But the downtown is compact, dense, lived in, full of stores and hotels and restaurants and just 15 minutes or so outside of town you can find a fish hatchery or a park packed full of yellow warblers in the summer. And you know...if you spend about 90 minutes driving west you are in the Rockies surrounded by some of the most gorgeous country I've ever been in.

Let me say for the record that I've wanted to visit a fish hatchery for several years now. I saw one somewhere in some wooded area in the United States a few years ago and thought maybe it would be cool to go check one out. By the time I'd processed that thought, we had moved on from whatever hatchery inspired that idea but in Calgary I couldn't resist. It's basically like a fish farm where they grow fish. Trout in Calgary. Fascinating stuff. But that's not what this post is about.

Let me also say that those warblers I wrote about at the end of last year as migratory attractions in Virginia spend their whole summer in Canada and there is a park called Inglewood Bird Sanctuary in Calgary that is like yellow warbler central. We'd never seen one of these birds in person before and we managed maybe eight or nine in a couple of hours one morning and heard many, many more.

About 64,000 trout and one yellow warbler. I'm rounding up on the fish.

So about that Stampede. Every July, Calgary hosts a 10 day event which can only be described as a celebration of all things horse and agricultural and cowboy and Native American. I don't know how else to put it. Rodeo? Sure, they got that. Pavilions with farm animals? Oh yeah. A Native American camp with displays about indigenous life? Yep, got that too. Parade with Shania Twain as grand marshal? Yes, sir! Although not every year on Shania. Chuck wagon races? Unbelievably, absolutely. Rides, food stalls and more cowboy hats than you have ever seen in your life? Yahoo!!!!!

Have you ever seen an indigenous relay race? I hadn't either. I suggest if you ever get a chance to do so that you check one out and get as close to the relay exchange point as possible. We saw two heats of these things as part of the opening night Evening Show (there's one each of the ten nights of the Stampede) which features a twin bill of these races and some chuck wagon races, which is exactly what it sounds like...a chuck wagon being pulled around a race track by four horses in front of each wagon.

These relay races...I knew they were on horseback so I figured there would be four or so horses with riders who would each do a lap and then hand a baton to the next mounted teammate and so on until all the laps were done and someone finished first. Not so. It's one dude racing against three other dudes riding a horse bareback around a track; dismounting and getting on a second horse (also bareback); then switching to a third horse after the second lap; and finishing the third and final lap on a third horse, and of course no saddle on that one either. 

I don't know that I've seen an athletic contest more incredible and I've seen my fair share of athletic events in my life. I didn't know someone could jump from the ground onto a horse's back with no help or hands and then take off on said horse less than about a second after he landed on the horse's back. We saw messed up horse transfers, we saw someone fall off a horse and we saw a horse handler (someone holds the horses in place waiting for transfer) or two get knocked over during a horse exchange. But when this was done right...just amazing. The speed which these guys come into the exchange is just wow! They basically fly off one horse and leap right onto the next. I don't know what to say. I didn't expect something like this out of the Stampede Evening Show. I'm still stunned.

I don't know if I'll ever make it to a second Stampede but I have to tell you (and I'm shocked to be writing this), I'm not ruling it out.

Chuck wagon races and Native American hoop dancer. Calgary Stampede. Lots of cowboy hats.

Our opening day Stampede visit was on July 4, which of course is Independence Day in the United States. We knew there would be fireworks after the evening show. We didn't know exactly how long we'd have to wait for them (the Evening Show starts at 7:30 pm but sun doesn't set until after 10) but we knew there would be some. We hoped that these fireworks would be our second of this trip, expecting some on Canada Day (July 1) only to be denied by threat of wildfire. That's cool. I've been near enough to one wildfire in my life already and I'm good not being near one again.

I have never been to a fireworks show like we saw that night. It was absolutely spectacular. There were more fireworks for longer than I can ever remember seeing in one place at one time. The cover picture of this post is one shot from the end sequence that night. It looks like an artist's rendering but I assure you, it's totally and completely real. Canada gave me my best July 4 fireworks ever. Go figure!

I've been reading books this year. I try to read a book or two about new places we visit to get myself psyched up for the experience and maybe to learn a thing or two before I arrive someplace new. One of the two books I read before this trip was about a solo trip across Canada with a canoe that author Adam Shoalts made in 2017. It's called "Beyond The Trees" and it kept me occupied for a few weeks this winter and spring. There's one part of the book that reads as follows:

"I enjoy returning to old haunts as much as the next person, but they don't have quite the same magical allure as unknown places..."

We travel a lot more than a lot of people we know. We for sure have some old haunts we love to go back to. We spend time in New York City every year and we've already spent a week this year re-visiting Tokyo, which I can see us visiting many times in the future if we have time and enough resources to keep knocking off new places and going back to places we love. Canada was not new to us, but Calgary and the mountains of Alberta and British Columbia sure were unknown places and they both definitely had a lot of magical allure. Who knows...maybe one day we might consider that corner of the globe as an old haunt. 

Blog posts about mountains and other stuff to follow.

Happy Canada Day! (July 1) from Jasper National Park.