Top Of The World

Through our first four full days in the Canadian Rockies in late June and early July we had visited or traveled through four Parks Canada National Parks. But it wasn't really that straightforward. We'd started out driving in Banff National Park and Yoho National Park but didn't stop in either. When we started our visits for real we visited Yoho first; then Banff; then Kootenay National Park (twice); then Yoho again; then Banff again; then Jasper National Park; and finally Banff a third time. 

Our goal was six Parks in five full days. So after all of that back and forth laid out above, we were down to a single full day remaining and two parks un-visited. Time to double up on Glacier National Park and Mount Revelstoke National Park. Last day, here we go!

So it's not like having two Parks to visit in the last day was an accident or anything. We planned it this way. Indeed, the very reason why we picked Golden, British Columbia as our home in the Rockies this year was so we could spend time in six Parks. And we planned all along to do Glacier and Mount Revelstoke in one single day. To visit the first four Parks, we headed east. To hit the last two, we'd head west.

So far, I've written and published these blog posts in the order we visited the Parks. If I did that with the last two Glacier would be first because we had to drive through that Park to get to Mount Revelstoke. But because we didn't actually do any park stuff in Glacier until the return trip, Revelstoke gets the five spot and Glacier gets saved for last. 

There's another reason Glacier is last but that's for another post.

I have to tell you Revelstoke didn't start out looking so promising. 

Our major planned stop in that Park was a drive to the top of its namesake mountain and the quick walk from the parking lot to the actual top of the mountain so we could see multiple peaks of the Canadian Rockies in all their glory all around us. Revelstoke appeared to us to be one of the only places where summiting the top of a mountain involved very little walking up. And being no mountaineers but finding a view like that too hard to pass on with little effort, we were all in.

The night before we were due to visit Revelstoke we checked the navapp to confirm the driving time and discovered bad news: the road to the summit wasn't open all the way to the top. We knew there would be the risk of snow still affecting access to the mountain top in early July which is why we pushed this park as late in our trip as possible. Finding out it was closed was a bit of a gut punch. But having no other plan, we figured we'd go anyway, make all the other stops we planned and see how far up the mountain we could get.

The view from halfway up Mount Revelstoke.

Our first stop in Mount Revelstoke National Park was at a place called Skunk Cabbage Boardwalk. We needed a stop along the way and I'd never seen a skunk cabbage. That and a reasonable length on the walk at that point seemed like a good break in the drive. 

It didn't work. We saw no skunk cabbages. We saw no boardwalk. We walked in the woods until we got to a sign telling us we could proceed no further. "End of Trail" was the actual message. No explanation other than that. But no cabbages. And no walk. Stop number one closed down  and our directions to the summit of Mount Revelstoke still having us stopping short. Not looking good!

And while we didn't know it at the time we stopped at Skunk Cabbage Boardwalk, our planned stop at Giant Cedars Boardwalk on the way back was also closed. Three planned stops. Three closed stops. I'm telling you...Mount Revelstoke didn't start out looking so promising.

The path to Skunk Cabbage Boardwalk. Only...no skunk cabbages and no boardwalk.

Then we got a break. That information that the road to the summit of Mount Revelstoke was closed? Turned out it was false. The internet is not always right. Shocker, I know. We rolled right through the Park gate and started the long, slow climb up that zig zag road to the top-most parking lot but we were on our way. 

And to be perfectly clear, the top-most parking lot was closed, so we really went to the next top-most parking lot. That meant a little more walking than we planned on this one. And of course, there were multiple, multiple signs about bears. Ugh! Are you kidding me? Why is the summit parking lot not open?

There were no bears. Who are we kidding?

Wildflowers? Is this it?

The signature attraction at the summit of Mount Revelstoke is apparently meadows and meadows of wildflowers. And of course, because I used the word "apparently" in the prior sentence, we did NOT see meadows and meadows of wildflowers. But that does not mean Mount Revelstoke was a disappointment. 

First, while we didn't see really very many wildflowers at all, you could tell they were coming. There were little orange and yellow flowers dotting the sides of the road to the summit. If these are the first ones to emerge and they are going to be followed by many, many more of the same sorts of things, I bet they are spectacular. And yes, I know I'm projecting the whole thing here and there might never be more than we found by the side of the road. 

We have a whole list of "next time" things to see in the Canadian Rockies. The wildflowers on Mount Revelstoke might have to be added to that list. Although if we are staying in Jasper "next time", it's going to be tough to get all the way to Mount Revelstoke. 

Second, the summit was incredible. Yes, it took more walking than we planned and I'm convinced we took about the most indirect route we could take that took us through what looked like remote back country (and therefore possibly filled with bears...I know, I'm fixated a bit here) but was really a stone's throw from the nearest paved road. At the very top of the mountain, there's an old historic fire lookout and it really is worth the very non-stressful (totally serious) final climb. You may have to scramble over some snow to get there but it really is an awesome view. There are mountains in that Rocky Mountain range all around you and it is a super clear 360 degree view. There is nothing else in the way of that view on the top of the mountain.

Third, there's a Native American art trail near the top of the mountain called First Footsteps. Any time we get to explore art created by the descendants of the original inhabitants of this continent of ours we feel privileged. And seeing sculpture and other works of art against the natural background of the Canadian Rockies is just an amazing setting. I mean we are on top of a mountain for crying out loud.

The real joy here was the summit. Of all the mountain views we'd been gazing and gawking at all week, the ones we got from the top of Mount Revelstoke were by far the most expansive and distant. We really got a sense of how far this range that we'd been exploring for the better part of a week covered. And we knew we couldn't see far enough to see all of what we'd driven through and past and in for the four days prior to our mountain topping. 

But ain't it always the small things that put experiences over the top just a little bit.

In 2011, some Parks Canada employees at Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland decided to drop 18 pairs of red Adirondack chairs somewhere in the Park for people to discover. They picked some iconic, but also some obscure, places to locate these seats. Some could be stumbled upon easily; others would take a little more work or would be more out of the way.

It became sort of a thing. Today, there are more than 400 red Adirondack chairs scattered about all over the wilds of Canada. We had maybe 10 or 12 approximate locations on our itinerary where we could find a pair or two (or 10 or 12, I guess). Yet after four plus days spending at least 60% of our waking hours in Parks Canada National Parks, not a single red chair was discovered. Until Mount Revelstoke.

Yep, on our walk to the summit, just as we reached the upper (closed) parking area, we looked to our right and there was our first pair of red chairs. Pointed towards one of those gorgeous views at the top of the mountain. We climbed up to the old fire watch and then on the way back down the mountain, spent five minutes or so looking out over the Rockies from a red chair each.

And after we drove, struck out at Cabbage Skunk Boardwalk, summited and sat, we had some lunch. Packed lunch, of course!

We first started packing lunch on National Park trips in 2020 during COVID. We sort of had to. Between closed restaurants and not wanting to get sick, we started hitting the grocery store in whatever town we were staying at, got up 15 or so minutes earlier than usual every day and made a sandwich and threw some chips and maybe a couple of other things in a lunch bag. We love it. It allows us to stop wherever we want when we are hungry and pick somewhere gorgeous to just sit and recharge with some food. 

Our choice at Mount Revelstoke was the spot below, right next to a clear mountain lake that I feel pretty confident in saying is all snow melt run off. It was peaceful and calm and sunny and the Parks Canada folks had managed to place a picnic table right next to it so we could sit and eat. We packed lunch on fours days on this vacation. This spot was my favorite. And that along with four of five other things made Revelstoke memorable.

Mount Revelstoke didn't go exactly to plan. I still wonder about those wildflowers. But it was pretty amazing all the same. While we were eating, we talked to a woman who was clearly admiring how brave we were for eating right out in the open near a lake with no escape route in bear country. She told us she was deathly afraid of bears. Yep! On some level, I guess we all are. By that time we'd seen enough of western Canada to take a pretty good educated guess that we weren't going to be seeing any bears during our lunch stop. We ended up being right.

Lunch view. Table for two lakeside, please.

Poutine

Word association time: Canadian food.

You said poutine, right? 

I know you said poutine. No way do you think anything else when you hear "Canadian food". The most recent season of Top Chef (best show on television, by the way) was staged in Canada and when the chef contestants were asked what they thought when they heard "Canadian food", they all (to a person) said poutine. 

Poutine is it. Poutine = Canadian food. And I know it's a bit insulting to Canada but it just it what it is.

Before we headed up north to Canada in late June, I did some snooping on menus in the two towns we were staying on this trip (Golden, BC and Calgary) and it seemed to me that there was a lot of poutine on the menus of a lot of restaurants that we might entertain going to. You can even upgrade your side of fries or salad or whatever comes with your meal to poutine at most places. I was looking at Canada as poutine wonderland. Plain and simple, I was pretty darned stoked for this experience.

Maybe some words about poutine are in order? In case the cover picture (which of course is a dish of poutine) of this post doesn't speak for itself.

Poutine is not a complicated dish in any way. It's French fried potatoes topped with gravy and cheese curds. Sure...I get it, these days you can get it with all sorts of other toppings but if you boil it down to its essence, it's fries with gravy and cheese curds.

The dish was invented in Quebec in the late 1950s. Of course, like most food origin stories (the Philly cheesesteak and the French dip sandwich come to mind here), there is a healthy amount of debate about the one true originator of the dish. So sure, Le Roy Jucep in Drummondville, QC has a copyright registration certificate for the dish issued by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office but that might just mean the owner of the place got to the Office first. 

It appears that the earliest appearance of poutine on a menu may have been at Le Lutin Qui Rit in Warwick, QC but that place apparently didn't add gravy until a few years after they put in on the menu. So is it really poutine, then? There's a third restaurant in the mix but suffice it to say for the purposes of this blog post poutine is a dish from Quebec. No real debate there. If I ever make it to Quebec, maybe I'll do a more exhaustive examination than just lazily checking Wikipedia.

I have had amazing poutine before our trip this summer. I had some incredible poutine with pastrami in some restaurant that I can no longer remember the name of in Toronto and I had some awesome straight up poutine (maybe with some chives added) at The Vanguard in Milwaukee a few years later. But a whole week in Canada to explore poutine? Surely this would add to my appreciation of this Canadian dish immensely.

Lebanese poutine? Topped with chicken shawarma. At Beirut Street Food, Calgary.

Now, I can concede that one issue I might have run into here is that British Columbia and Calgary are really nowhere near Quebec and that the quality and authenticity of poutine might diminish as you get from from its point of origin. Now, granted...Toronto and Milwaukee aren't really that close to Quebec either but they are a whole lot closer than Calgary, not to mention points west.

On the fourth day of our trip, I was four dishes of poutine into my 2025 poutine quest and I was not particularly impressed. I'd eaten poutine in everything from a Lebanese restaurant to a dedicated poutinerie. I'd eaten it topped with chicken shawarma and hot peppers intentionally and with green onions accidentally despite mostly trying to stick to pure simple poutine. I'd had poutine served twice in aluminum foil dishes that are way too big (and are also the small size). And I'd had poutine with lightly battered French fries and with gravy that looks congealed but was actually pretty tasty (see picture below). 

As an aside, why do people lightly batter fries? Why? Just leave them alone. They are fine as just fried potatoes. 

The part that was just not impressing me on my poutine food tour on day four was the gravy. And it's really a pretty simple issue: why is it always so salty? All those variations of poutine noted a couple of paragraphs before this one...really, really salty gravy. And that honestly sort of ruined every dish. I'd say maybe in a pinch, if I was really, really in need of some poutine and didn't mind the heavy-ish amount of salt in the gravy, I'd cave and order some poutine from The Wolf's Den in Golden (cover picture). But the rest? Not particularly interested.

The Wolf's Den is the place with the battered fries, if that tells you anything about my opinion of the other three dishes I'd eaten to that point.

It was at this point that I took a poutine break. It wasn't intentional. We just ended up at some places to eat where I wanted something that didn't go particularly well with poutine or one place may have just been a bit too fancy. And by the time I really realized it, I found myself down to my last full day in Canada and I still hadn't had some poutine that I would consider as good. This was not going well.

Our last full day in Canada was spent at the Calgary Stampede, a rodeo / agricultural fair / amusement park / celebration of heritage / biggest thing all year in Calgary that is way better than all those things put together. Maybe they would have a poutine stall? Other than breakfast at the hotel and lunch in an airport lounge, this would be my last poutine shot of this trip. And yes, they did have a form of poutine on the breakfast menu but that dish was conspicuously absent from the reduced-but-totally-free menu for Hyatt Globalists. And there's no way I'm spending money on breakfast when there are other free options that are likely just as good.

So sure enough, when it got to about lunch time at the Stampede, we looked for the word poutine on a food stall in the food area. And sure enough, right there next to a burger place that also sold poutine was a place called La Poutinerie. This had to be it. This was the place I was getting my last poutine of the trip. I guess it was encouraging that it sounded French. Maybe.

One order of "poutine" please. No hot dog poutine or Greek poutine or maple bacon poutine or shepherd's pie poutine. Just straight up poutine. Fries. Gravy. Curds.

La Poutinerie's poutine. Calgary Stampede.

You know what? This worked. This was what I needed. It was hot. The fries were correctly cooked and not battered in any way. The cheese curds were melty enough around the edges, even on top of the dish. And the gravy was beefy and not overly salty. There! How difficult was that? I mean, just look at the color and consistency of that gravy in the picture above. The best poutine I had in a week in Canada (admittedly far, far from Quebec) was from a stall at the Calgary Stampede. 

If I'm going to gripe at all, I could have used some more cheese curds. The guys working in the La Poutinerie stall were just placing them on top of the dish so by the time I got to the bottom half it was just fries and gravy. Maybe that's my fault for not mixing them in if that's the way I wanted it.

This is for sure one of the least scientific and casual food quests I have ever been on but I'm satisfied. Thank you, Calgary stampede. Next year we are heading to Winnipeg and other parts Manitoba for a week. I'm not going to be as fanatical about the poutine next year but you know I'm having it somewhere.

This is my "this is some good poutine" face.

I Melt With You

We visited six Parks Canada National Parks in our week or so west of Calgary at the beginning of summer this year: Banff, Yoho, Kootenay, Jasper, Glacier and Mount Revelstoke. In one of those parks, we stood on a glacier, one of those slow moving masses of ice that did so much to carve out the Canadian Rockies and make them as spectacular as they are today. You might naturally assume that we visited a glacier in Glacier National Park. You'd be wrong. Time for some Jasper stories. Welcome to Canadian Rockies Park blog post number four. 

When we planned this trip to Canada earlier this year, we decided to stay in a town in British Columbia called Golden. Golden is situated effectively between Yoho National Park and Glacier National Park and it would enable us to get to each of the parks we hoped to spend time in without any sort of crazy long drives in any one day. For what it's worth, I'm OK driving six to seven hours a day on vacation as long as there are plenty of stops. Golden would allow seven hours on the road to be about the maximum time we'd spend in the car in any one day while also hitting all six parks.

If there was a compromise we'd have to make staying in Golden, it would be that we'd have to only make it part of the way into Jasper National Park. That seemed to be a good choice: the big attraction we picked to visit in Jasper (the glacier) was in the south end of the park close to Banff National Park and Jasper had been the victim of some massive wildfires last year so maybe what we presumed would be a burned out landscape would make it the best to do on a limited visit. 

Plus, five out of six ain't bad, right?

Then we got to Canada and started talking to people. 

I'm not generally one to second guess my own decisions, particularly when it comes to travel. But folks that we met in Canada made Jasper sound pretty special. It sounded wilder and more remote and filled with all the wildlife we were looking for that we didn't find (for the most part) in the other five parks. 

Regrets? I'm not sure I'm going all the way to that sort of thing just yet. The tales are one thing and if we had discovered what people seemed to promise what Jasper could be...then yes, there might be a bit of regret. A bit. I'm not there yet. And I won't get there certainly any time soon. We make our choices and we live with them. 

But if there's one place we didn't visit on this trip that would make me go back to the same area of our planet, it is Jasper National Park. And I'd probably do it a little later in the summer when the berries are on the bushes so that countless grizzly bears just line the sides of the road to Maligne Lake totally oblivious to tourists just pulled over to watch them eat. Or at least that's what I'm imagining based on the stories we were told. Those stories may be a bit tall.

Add Jasper to the "next time" list along with canoeing, Emerald Lake when it's not misty and Lake O'Hara after a successful lottery try. For sure, if we ever do find ourselves in Calgary headed west again, I am pretty confident in stating that we'll be headed to Jasper. And not just for the day.

Having said all that, we did visit Jasper National Park this year.

We spent most of our driving time west of Calgary on the Trans-Canada Highway, which for the most part is a two-lane (each way) divided highway cutting its way through the path that years earlier had been surveyed and used as the route for the Canadian Pacific Railway. Indeed, look to one side or the other of that road when you are driving it and it's easy to spot the railroad tracks running alongside today's road and sometimes it may be topped with a very long cargo train.

Making the trip to Jasper takes you off the Trans-Canada Highway. And when you make the turn towards Jasper, the road instantly looks a lot different. Now it's one lane each way and it's not divided. And then there's that sign that says there's no cell phone service for the next 150 kilometers or so. Visiting Jasper is different than Banff or Yoho or Kootenay.

We made it as far down (or up, considering we were heading north) that road as Athabasca Falls, which considering my whining earlier about not being able to make it far into Jasper from Golden is to within about 30 minutes of the town of Jasper and about 75 minutes from Maligne Lake along the road with packs of grizzlies (allegedly) on both side of the road just hanging out eating berries. But considering we'd already driven about 3-1/2 hours just to get to Athabasca Falls, we'd be adding at least another 2-1/2 hours to what was already a seven hour drive that day. 

Next time.

The road to Jasper. Technically still in Banff. Check out those mountains.

Before we got to our turnaround spot of Athabasca Falls, we stopped at our primary Jasper target: the glacier bearing the same name as the Falls. 

A visit to Athabasca Glacier is not a casual thing. It's not like pulling off the side of the road to see most of the other gorgeous scenery in these Parks Canada parks. You can't drive yourself up onto the ice, and walking over the thing without any sort of map showing all the massive crevasses 150 feet or more deep that will crush you to death when the ice moves is not a smart idea either. I assume nobody does the second thing today but we were told stories of people missing on the Glacier and rescue squads refusing to go looking because the odds of survival after falling into a glacier are basically nil.

To get on the Glacier, you need to book a tour. And across from the Glacier there's a visitor center that will allow you to do just that. We picked the Columbia Icefield Adventure, which involves a trip up onto the ice followed by a stop at a viewpoint over the valley featuring a cantilevered glass-floored walkway. Yeah...not particularly interested in that last part. It was all about the Glacier for us.

On our way up to Athabasca. The "dirt" is ash from wildfires.

Time for a news flash: we are not the first people to set foot on Athabasca Glacier. Not ever. Not this century. Not this year. Not even the day we visited, despite the fact that we were on the first tour time of the day. Somehow (and I'm guessing here on the number a bit...) there were about 100 people up there before us the day we visited. And I swear we booked the first tour.

The indigenous people in the area, the Stoney Nakoda, were likely regular visitors to the spot they called Cha-a tonga for centuries before the white man showed up in what is now Canada and grabbed their land. On this last subject (the land-grabbing one), the Canadians refer to the treaties signed between the Canadian government and the native populations by treaty number. Access to the Athabasca Glacier is covered under Treaty 8. And sure, there's some compensation and an understanding that less than maximum persecution of native peoples will take place after the treaty was signed, but it's still a land grab.

Once white people started visiting the area for fun, the first roads were laid into the area by and for mountaineers. The global depression of the 1930s saw the first government-sponsored road constructed past the Glacier but it was in the 1950s after World War II that people started jumping in cars for an up-close look at Athabasca. Time to start some tours and start making some money.

The first excursions to the Glacier in the '50s were on horseback. Thank God they don't do that any more. Times have for sure changed. You get up to the spot where you are allowed to stand on the ice today by taking a bus from a parking area up to a second parking / departure area where you get into a bus-sized all-terrain vehicle equipped with six five-foot (or so) tall tires. These monsters will navigate over the top of the Glacier, including going down (and then back up again) a 35 degree plus slope. Think that sounds like a gentle grade? Think again.

I can't imagine getting up the Glacier on horseback. Full disclosure, I've never been on a horse and really don't have it on my life list in any way but that's not why I can't imagine visiting a glacier while on a horse. It just sounds too slippery and dangerous. Between the horses and today's ATVs-on-steroids vehicles, they used what look like regular cars and I really can't imagine going up in those vehicles. There's one of those older vehicles (shown below) outside the Starbucks at the visitor center. It doesn't even look like it can be driven on snow, let alone down (and then back up again) a steep icy slope.

Don't pop one of those five feet high tires by the way. They apparently cost just shy of $7K CAD with about a $4K CAD install.

Transportation to the Glacier: Today (bottom) and the horses-to-today transition vehicle (top).

The glacier we stood on after we got out of our transportation is actually a finger (or what's known as a moraine) of the Athabasca Glacier. There was a time that it extended over the road that we drove up, past the visitor center and part way up the mountain behind the visitor center. Now it's a whole lot smaller. These things are disappearing. And fast. There's a lake at the bottom of the finger we visited that is pretty big; three years ago, it didn't exist. There was a lot of water rushing past and around us while we stood on and admired the disappearing giant. I get that it was summer (although barely) when we were there but the amount of melting was astonishing to me.

This disappearing is really why we decided to take this trip. Because pretty soon although maybe not in my lifetime, this Glacier might be gone. And that "maybe" in the previous sentence is not a sure thing. We were told 30 to 80 years is the estimated future lifespan of Athabasca. There's a chance I'll be here in 30 years and the glacier we stood on in early July won't. This thing has been around since the last Ice Age or at least 12,000 years but likely a lot more. But it won't be here at the end of this century in all likelihood. 

We were told (and I have not been able to verify this figure) that glaciers supply 75% of the planet's fresh water. Not that Athabasca's going to be the last one but what happens when they are gone? 

The Athabasca Glacier melting.

This is not our first time up close and personal with a glacier. We got pretty close to a couple  in Alaska in 2017 (including one incredibly intimate encounter on a very large cruise ship, if that statement is even credible) and we actually spent some time walking over the top of one and avoiding falling into somewhere we'd never return from in Iceland. 

Compared to those two experiences, this one could have been considered a bit of a bust. You get driven to a spot on the ice, get out of the vehicle and then spent 20-30 minutes wandering around within the very small roped-in area before heading back the other way. It was certainly not as spectacular as watching and hearing ice fall into the sea in Alaska and was nowhere near as interactive as actually trekking across a field of ice atop crampons right before the winter solstice in Iceland. 

But these experiences are fleeting and special and not long for this world and the landscape in the Canadian Rockies is just spectacular everywhere so to see it from a different perspective stood atop a slightly slushy glacier was still something to treasure. This is not something we are likely to repeat. We do still have all of the rest of Jasper that we omitted on this trip to explore and I'd love to think that one day we'll be driving past the Athabasca Glacier again. And I'm sure the next time we do, the size of this thing (or really the lack thereof) will send chills down my spine.

O Canada! And OF COURSE you exit through the gift shop.

There are two other memories of Jasper worth sharing.

First, Athabasca Falls is worth a stop. It's more of a rapids than a true falls, although admittedly not one I'd want to kayak or canoe through. Although, let's face it, I don't want to kayak or canoe through any rapids on any river anywhere in the world. For perspective, it's more on the Natural Bridge level than the Takakkaw Falls level (both Yoho National Park references). 

Athabasca Falls also appeared to be at about the southern end of last year's wildfires. When we rolled into the parking area, we passed a charred landscape with bare pine tree trunks standing straight up with zero foliage or even branches. Every time we pass through an area like this, I can't imagine how ferocious these fires are. I've been past too many of these sorts of scenes, including one in Northern California in 2018 where the fire was still raging maybe just a few miles off. Scary stuff. 

Second...that cantilevered, glass-floored walkway that they call the Skywalk? We went out there. I mean we had to. The bus doesn't go directly back to the visitor center. And while we were there we figured we'd take in the views and step onto the glass walkway backwards and take a picture. Just one step. Very courageous, right? 

So then I figured...how old am I and how scared I am that I can't walk out onto a glass-floored walkway that is clearly remaining structurally stable despite having been in place with people walking on it every day for years and years? So I walked it. The whole thing. Start to finish. I even stopped and took a picture of the view when I was standing on the walkway. 

Take that, fear of heights!!!!

However...

I did this under the following conditions. (1) I did not look down; I knew there was a seriously good chance that if I did, I would stop dead in place and be unable to move. (2) I held onto the handrail all the way along with the exception of one small spot where there was a family that was just messing around and clearly not looking to move. Come on, people. I'm trying to walk this thing as quickly as possible. And (3) when I took the below photograph, I pulled my iPhone up to my face rather than looking down (see number 1 above) to unlock the phone. 

I am pretty confident I looked like a scared little baby motoring over that glass floor looking obviously straight ahead unflinchingly. But I did it. And yes, that cantilever was bouncing noticeably. And yes, that was a bit unnerving.

But now I can say I've been there, done that. For the Skywalk anyway. Not Jasper. I feel we have some unfinished business. Next time.

The view from the Skywalk. No looking down.

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.