Dandelion

No those aren't dandelions. They are buffalo berries. In Kootenay National Park. This post eventually will discuss a dandelion or two. Just bear with me on that one for a little bit. Be patient. We'll get there.

Of the six Parks Canada National Parks we visited in Alberta and British Columbia this summer, Kootenay National Park was our favorite. I feel confident making that statement and if our agenda had gone a little differently, I can confidently say that I could have totally seen things going an alternate way. Not that we were looking to necessarily anoint a favorite park from our week in Canada or anything. And not that everything we did in five full days in the Canadian Rockies wasn't just incredible to make us fall madly in love with the area generally. But Kootenay was for sure the best. 

Besides the amazing mountains and gorgeous water we saw in pretty much every park, Kootenay beat out its neighbors for two reasons: (1) it was the only Park in which we hiked (like, seriously hiked; not walking from a parking lot along a paved path to an overlook or something) and (2) well, that's the dandelion part of the story.

I like hiking. Like once per vacation like hiking. I don't need to do it a lot. Just like once in a week's vacation. The hike in Kootenay by the way...incredible. But we'll get to that. And sooner than we'll get to the dandelions. I promise.

Kootenay National Park. The view from the trailhead.

But first...some history. Not real history. History from this blog.

The last time we hiked in a National Park, it was in California's Sequoia National Park just about two years ago before we set off for Canada. We did an early morning walk on what we assumed would be a well-traveled and busy trail and what we hoped would get us some sightings of a black bear or two. The second part came true. We saw three different black bears pretty close to us while we walked. But it wasn't on a trail packed with people. In fact, we didn't see anyone else the whole of that morning walk. So effectively, we were alone with no cell service on a trail with bears nearby and no bear spray on hand. Not too smart, right? Nothing bad happened or even came close to happening but still...not too smart.

We were determined that if we hiked in Canada (and I really wanted to in a low impact way) that we were NOT going to hike around bears alone without bear spray. So rather than wing it and do things alone like we did in Cali in 2023, we looked for an organized, guided hike to shepherd us along in bear country. And if you believe the signs like pretty much everywhere we traveled west of Calgary this year, the whole place is bear country. Fortunately for us, Parks Canada has a few guided hike options.

We picked something called the Stanley Glacier hike, which sounds like it's a hike to a glacier but it's totally not. Apparently, the area around Kootenay and Yoho National Parks is rich in more than just mountains, lakes, rivers and wildlife. And if you look in the right spots, there are also a ton of fossils just lying around on the ground. I like fossils and I really like the "relatively easy" description of the trail on the website. Fossils, and not the glacier named after the same dude that the Stanley Cup is named after, are the feature of the Stanley Glacier Hike. I'm all in! Sign us up!

At the Stanley Glacier hike trailhead. Snowshoe hare. Prettier in winter when they are all white.

So we are at the trailhead at 7:30 am on a crisp Sunday late June morning (if I'm remembering right we are talking high 40s / low 50s as a temperature) ready to go with our guide for the day Steve, a dude with a business degree who just figured it would fit him a whole lot better if he spent a lot more time in the great outdoors than behind a desk doing what he was educated to do. I totally respect that.

I'll say a few words about this Steve guy in a paragraph or two but the first thing he says to us (after we signed the waiver form, of course) is that (and I'm paraphrasing here) there's pretty much no way you will see a bear on this hike. Bear country? Yes! Bears on this hike in late June before the buffalo berries and all other kinds of berries are available for easy eating trail-side? No. Not a chance.

That's OK. We didn't take this hike to see bears. We took this guided hike in the hope that we'd find a fossil or two and so that in the event we came across a bear, we'd either have a critical mass to scare it or them away or if we faced a rush attack from a whole pack of bears, maybe there would be someone in the group slower than us. 

Kidding about the last thing. Probably. I mean when do bears hunt in a pack?

Steve.

So we are off. On a scheduled seven hour hike through not-right-now-bear country to go find some fossils. Maybe. Steve promises we'll take it slow and easy and stop a lot on the way there (or uphill) to learn about the kinds of creatures we might see in fossil form. I really want to find some fossils.

The hike is an interactive experience. There's learning on the way and we were encouraged to rotate who walked directly behind Steve so that he'd have a chance to interact with everyone in the group. This, as it turns out, would benefit both us and Steve. That Clark's nutcracker story I posted on my Banff post? Got that from Steve. 

Maybe 30 minutes or so into the walk, we started learning. We were each randomly assigned a fossil in photograph form on one rest stop; were then challenged to match them to an artist's rendering of what the creature or organism might have looked like on another rest stop; and then spent some time putting the whole cast of creatures in food chain order on a pee and rest break after that. Peeing in the woods.

I got something very unexciting with my fossil here. In my defense, the selection of our assigned photographs of fossils was completely blind. But it was made known pretty early that I picked (or was randomly assigned) the bottom of the food chain plant species. Did that kill the experience for me? Absolutely not. But it did allow me to guess where I fell when we got to the food chain exercise. I aced that stop!

Marpolia spissa. Bottom of the food chain. Oh yeah! That's totally me.

A couple of things before we get to how amazing this hike was.

First, let's clarify what we are looking for here. These are not fossils like the dinosaur fossils we looked for and barely (and I do mean barely) found in Utah five years ago. We are talking much more primitive life than that. See the marpolia fossil and artist's rendering above? That's the kind of thing we are seeking out. Although maybe a little more complex than the marpolia since I did, you know, have the bottom of the food chain organism assigned to me.

Time-wise, we are talking about 506 million years ago (dinosaurs, for perspective, date back as far as about 250 million years) in the Cambrian Era. Before internal skeletons. Before life on land. Before any sort of living creature was more than like a foot in length. And did they look like the artists' renderings we were provided with to illustrate our assigned fossils? Who knows. Apparently it's mostly a guess based on what current sea creatures look like. If there's any frame of reference that I can offer for what we were looking for (other than the marpolia), if you know what a trilobite was, maybe that tells you a little about what we were hoping to find somewhere in the Canadian Rockies in fossil form that day.

Second, let's spend a paragraph or so talking about this Steve guy. In the pantheon of most incredible tour guides on any continent addressing any subject whatsoever, Steve has to be pretty high up that list. In addition to pointing out buffalo berries and telling us bears can eat 200,000 berries per day AND proudly ditching business for the outdoors AND giving us the Clark's nutcracker story AND leading the whole group safely there and back again AND making connections with everyone on the hike AND telling us all about the creatures that became the fossils we were seeking, he also managed to describe to us why the Canadian and American Rocky Mountains are different AND put our existence and mass extinctions and climate change into perspective. How's that for a day hike? Certainly one of the best ever. Well done!

Food chain. Mine is at the very far right.

As I've already mentioned, this is not the first time we have looked for fossils. We haven't spent seven hours in the mountains walking to a place where there might be fossils but it's not our first rodeo here (although it may be our second). If we learned anything from the first time (again...Utah 2020) it's that not everything that dies becomes a fossil. It really takes a pretty specific set of circumstances to bury living organisms in the perfect kind of conditions to preserve them in an airless environment for thousands or millions of years.

And that is exactly what happened here in Kootenay. I guess modern science (which I believe; I do believe in science) has figured out that the organisms from all those millions of years ago that we were hoping to discover this past June were the victims of a sudden underwater silt avalanche that buried everything in its path. But not just some silt avalanche. One with particles so fine to enter any any body cavities and expel any damaging-to-preservation chemicals or compounds thus yielding a treasure trove of well-preserved fossils. 

Sound farfetched? It didn't to me. We got the same story around Dinosaur National Monument five years ago. Unusual climactic conditions. Natural event that concentrated and buried a number of (in that case) skeletons in one spot. No dying on the surface of the Earth and letting the creatures and the elements take the bodily remains. That's not how fossils get formed.

In the Rockies, all these fossils got preserved in a layer of shale, loose rock that breaks apart super easily and keeps basically falling down the mountain-sides as the land moves and people climb over it. You can actually see the band within the bare mountains where this loose rock is from. I would not want to be climbing on those faces, if I were ever inclined to do any vertical face mountain climbing. Which of course, I'm not.

Now...about that "relatively easy" hike. I guess that was true. There was some truth in advertising here. We certainly made it there and back and were never in real danger of dying or being seriously injured and we only had maybe one or two minor falls (and not us; the group as a whole). We also never really felt seriously out of breath or were exhausted or couldn't go on or needed airlifting out of there or anything like that. But it was challenging in spots, particularly traversing over a bunch of loose shale and just for me personally descending on any sort of rocky slope in general just makes me feel like my knees are constantly in danger of buckling. 

But this experience was worth it. So worth it. I know I've already raved in past posts from this trip about how gorgeous these mountains and the trees and rivers that come with them are from the driver's or passenger seat of a car. Try being in the middle of all that walking on your own two feet. Close to those trees. Seeing the mountains move as you walk closer and closer to them and the glaciers on top of them. Walking over and past and close to the rivers and streams and rapids and churning water.  Hearing (but not seeing; oh no not seeing) the many different kinds of warblers that summer up in the Canadian Rockies. Breathing that crisp clean air. Worth it.

Kootenay National Park. The shale is in the pale brown-yellow layer about halfway up the mountain on the left.

Know what else was worth it? Finding a fossil. 

We were told before we descended and then scoured the pile of shale in the valley at the farthest point of our hike that we were likely to find some fossils already placed on some of the larger boulders before us. That was great. We didn't understand how big or small these things were but at least we were likely to find something to look at. 

We were also told that near the largest boulder in the shale field there was a locker with some of the largest and most spectacular fossils found near where we were about to search. That was even better. Not only would we find something, we would find something pretty incredible. The "largest boulder" by the way looked like about four feet tall from the spot where we were told about all this. It turned out to be massive. Like probably 12 feet tall. Distance. What it does to your perspective...

So knowing that there are guaranteed fossils out there for me to see, I am of course not interested in any of those already found ones left by others and certainly not interested in those gorgeous amazing specimens in the locker. Oh no. I wanted to find one for myself that nobody else had ever flipped over a piece of shale and seen.

Did that happen? I have absolutely no idea. But pretty quickly (and I should absolutely note that remote from any of the guaranteed spots that we'd find fossils already laid out for us to see), I found one. Less than five minutes into the shale pile, I found a tiny little trilobite on a piece of yellow-ish shale. This thing was alive over 500 million years ago and is now perfectly preserved based on some freak accident of nature and on a Sunday afternoon in June in Canada, I was able to look at it in about perfect form. What kind of a wonderful world do we live in where I can do that?

Fossils: "Mine" (top) and something a bit more impressive (bottom).

So that covers the first thing that made Kootenay National Park the best Park of the trip. Now let's get to the dandelions.

The day after our fossil hike, we went back to Kootenay. We spent a couple of hours kayaking on the Columbia River near Radium Hot Springs near the southern entrance to Kootenay. We figured we'd drive through the Park and see what the other parts of the place would hold for us. In particular, Kootenay was our great hope for multiple species of large mammals. Grizzlies. Black bears. Moose. Elk. Sheep. Goats.

Most of what we did on our drive through Kootenay that day was to stop at random spots and look. We saw amazing landscapes and pretty much no wildlife on these stops and that was a theme throughout the day. And the whole trip in general, really.

But right after we entered the Park we found ourselves driving towards a gorgeous green lake on the right hand side of the road called Olive Lake. We had to stop and look. It looked that inviting. So we pulled into the turn lane, noticed very briefly that there were some people out of their car ahead of us looking right towards us and then looked to the right...black bear. Pull over. Put the car in park. And watch.

I have seen black bears in the wild before. Mount Rainier. Vermont. Maybe somewhere on I-81 in the middle of Pennsylvania. Grand Teton. And of course Sequoia National Park on foot without any bear spray. But I have never, ever been ten feet from a black bear in a car just watching him (or her, but most likely him) for 15 or 20 minutes just doing what he was doing which was pretty much being a bear in Canada and eating...you guessed it...dandelions.

For some sort of perspective here, the two photographs above were taken with my iPhone. It's an iPhone 15 Pro so it's a pretty good camera but it's still pretty limited when it comes right down to it from a zoom perspective. We were that close. Admittedly, I did hop out of the driver's seat and get into the back seat and drop the back seat window to get even closer. The view was that crystal clear. We were so close. We could hear this bear crunching on the dandelions, if that even seems possible. What a huge privilege to be able to do this. 

If there is a great time to look for bears, it's first thing in the morning or maybe towards the end of the day. This bear was out munching on dandelions at about 1 in the afternoon. We appreciate how lucky we were here. We also appreciate the quality and length of our time just a few feet from this bear. Particularly considering we wouldn't get anywhere near this close to any animal that didn't have wings or wasn't a golden-mantled ground squirrel in the rest of our time in the Canadian Rockies.

So super lucky. 

Bear close ups. NOT from the iPhone.

So apparently bears and dandelions are a thing. We mentioned this encounter to a Park ranger later in the week and he told us that bears love dandelions at this time of year considering there are no berries available for easy eating. Who knew?

We saw. We watched. We moved on. It would never be better all week from a creature spotting standpoint.

With nature, you can't always get what you want. We've learned that on pretty much every continent we've visited. I am sure we can count a disappointment in a lot of places that we have traveled over the past 12 years. We hope for quantity and quality of experiences in nature wherever we go but one small moment of quality can outweigh all the quantity we had hoped for, For me, Kootenay delivered on both. So, sure, the quantity of wildlife sightings was very disappointing but this was the best bear sighting for me ever and seven hours walking through Kootenay were in no way any sort of disappointment. 

Best park winner, Canada 2025. Kootenay. Against super strong competition, this place was still the best we had.