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.