As we will be on the road a fair bit tomorrow I thought I would do day 13 and 14 together as I am not sure how much time I will have in the morning. Tomorrow we start our trip back to Vancouver with an overnight stop in Kamloops.
Day 13
Today we are driving the Icefields Parkway from Jasper to Lake Louise, Banff and Field. We are stopping in Field which is in the Yoho National Park.
The Icefields Parkway runs for about 230km from Jasper to Lake Louise, and runs through some of the most spectacular scenery. Once you are outside of the Jasper area you really notice the difference as the fires didn’t get this far and everything goes back to being green.
We had purchased a self-guided audio tour of the Icefields Parkway and the narrator told us lots of interesting facts as we drove down the road, it certainly made the drive less tedious listening to a fact every time we went around a corner.
We started with Goats and Glaciers, there were glaciers, however there were no goats to be seen. The next major point of interest was the Stutfield Glacier which is across the Athabasca River from the parkway.
Then there are multiple glaciers (they are at the top of every mountain you drive past) all the way until you get to the Athabasca Glacier. You can get out here and do an organised glacier walk, which we didn’t do, or you can walk up to the glacier. There are little signs along the path showing where the glacier was each decade and how much it has receded. It was 2C and extremely windy and cold and I of course was wearing shorts so I froze as we walked up to the glacier.
From here you wind your way down to Lake Louise, which we got to about 10:30/11am and of course when we got there, there were no car parks (one of the reasons we are staying in Yoho is it is less discovered), so we headed to Banff for lunch. When we got to Banff there was a little farmers/creative market on so we wandered around the market before we wandering around town for a few hours.
We ended up getting into field about 4pm and once we were checked in we wandered over the park information area and spoke to a helpful ranger named Dennis and found out we should have purchased a longer ticket in Jasper so had to buy a new park ticket for the two nights in Field. Dennis also advised us that the park gets really busy and we should go to the Emerald Lake or Takakkaw Falls before 8:30am or after 5pm to avoid the worst of the tourists.
We are staying at a little place called the Truffle Pig Bistro which started as a restaurant and expanded into accommodation. We decided to have dinner at the restaurant and then have an early night as we have to be up early to get in front of the other tourists.
Day 14
We were up early and off by just after 8 this morning. We decided to do the Emerald Lake hike (about 5.6km) this morning, go to Golden for the day and then do the Takakkaw Falls about 5pm after most tourists have headed back to Banff or Lake Louise – there are very few accommodation options in Yoho.
Emerald Lake is amazing and reflects the mountains around it. The lake has glaciers to two sides and a large shale mountain that is protected – they have found a number of fossils in the deposits on the mountain. The walk is lovely, when we arrived there were no buses and only about 20 cars, so as we walked around we only occasionally encountered other hikers.
There is a hotel on the lakeside but most of the people staying there didn’t seem to be out and about hiking. You end the walk by walking through the hotel grounds and finish at the kayak rental place ($100 CAD per hour so we didn’t do this). They are repairing the boardwalk so there were a couple of places where we had to balance on beams as they were partially built.
From here we drove the 50km to Golden. Stu, Linsey and Molly did the bridge walk (suspension bridges) and Linsey and Molly did the cliffside coaster and the zipline. I sat at the picnic area. Originally they wanted us to pay $53 CAD for me just to sit there – they said that they couldn’t guarantee that I wouldn’t do the bridges – we managed to convince them that there was no way in hell I was going on the bridges and they let me go in for free. The supervisor did keep an eye on me but I of course kept to my word as there was no way in hell I was going on those bridges.
We have lunch at a lovely little restaurant called the Island and we had the most energetic and friendly server (Sylvester), he really earned his tip. Sylvester let us stay in our parking spot while we walked around town. Golden is very quaint and has a beautiful main street.
After our walk we drove back to the Takakkaw Falls and got a car park pretty close to the entry. We walked in the falls were absolutely amazing and they are fed from the Daly Glacier. They are the second tallest falls in Canada at 373m. We are now back at Truffle Pigs resting up after a full day. Tomorrow we head to Kamloops for the night then on to Vancouver.
davstuholidays 