Canadian Travel Journal Part 1:
Calgary to Savona

Calgary

We arrived in Calgary Saturday afternoon and took a cab straight to our B&B – the taxi driver didn’t know where it was and asked us for directions, even though we’d just arrived in the city. We eventually found it and were welcomed into a gorgeous house by Ron and his partner Michael. We had the run of the whole bottom floor of the house – lounge, bedroom and garden decking, and if it hadn’t have been so spotless it would have been a real home from home!

Saturday night we explored the local shops and restaurants on Uptown 17th Ave (a block away from our B&B), had a couple of beers in an Irish pub with live music and a pizza and jug of beer outside one of the restaurants and then went to bed and were snoring away by 7.30!

The next morning we were up early to possibly the best breakfast I have ever had – a banana split but with 3 different kinds of yogurt instead of ice cream, and cereal and berries instead of sprinkles. Then came the most divinely fluffy spiced turkey and asparagus omelette served with a croissant with homemade banana and rhubarb jam.

We went for a walk downtown but it was eerily quiet – nobody seems to come to the centre during the weekend as most people live out in the suburbs, a stark contrast to Vancouver when anybody and everybody is out on the street having breakfast, socialising or just chilling out on a sunny Sunday morning. The thing that struck me most about the city other than that was how tiny it was – there were few skyscrapers and not much of a commercial shopping area. We went for a nice walk along the river and over to the Kensington area which had a little more oomph about it and I suppose would be called the trendy part of town. It was about 31 degrees celcius and we were hot and bothered so we went into one of the local bars and watched the Turkish Grand Prix, but had to keep any cheering and excitement to a minimum because the barmaid was recording the race so didn’t want to know what was happening (pretty hard when she was surrounded by 3 huge screens showing it!).

In the evening we were picked up by my parents’ friend Jackie who emigrated with her husband a few years ago. She took us to her ranch in the country, somewhere near Canmore, and we had a nice night chatting away to her and Paul, being fed, and playing with the dogs. From their back porch there is nothing to see but empty farmland until you get little glimpse of the Rockies far in the distance.

The next morning we picked up our rental car and started on the drive to Jasper. We have no photos of Calgary city as there was nothing really worth taking a picture of in our opinion.

The Icefields Parkway

The drive between Calgary and Jasper was absolutely awesome. We bypassed Banff and Lakes Louise and Moraine because we’d seen them last year, although I would have liked to go back but we didn’t really have the time. After Lake Louise the road becomes known as the Icefields Parkway and it is lined with beautiful turquoise glacier-fed lakes and of course the glaciers themselves atop of huge mountains on either side. It must certainly be one of the most beautiful drives in the whole world, and a lot of people see their first bear, elk, wolf or coyote along this road which would make it all the more fantastic (we didn’t get lucky this time).

The first major stop was Bow Lake, which nestled alongside a mountain that contained the Crows Foot glacier – thousands of years old and 50 metres thick in places, I think it was the first glacier we’d both seen up close.




After a couple more lovely turquoise lakes we stopped at the trail to Peyto lake. It was quite a steep climb and took about 20 minutes but the view at the top of the lake surrounded by a whole corridor of mountains was breathtaking! It was just a shame that there was no access to the lakeshore.




Next major sight was the Columbia glacier on Athabasca Mountain. It was absolutely massive. We parked in the lot and walked up to the base of the glacier but my heart was really thumping and I felt quite unwell. I figured that it was a bit of altitude sickness and settled for taking just a few steps on the glacier then sitting down on a rock at the bottom and watching Graham walk as far as he could to the barriers at the top. He loved it. The only way you could go any further is to take a trip out on one of those buses with huge tyres (each wheel is taller than me), right up on top of the Columbia Icefields. Graham wanted to do this whilst at Jasper but we ran out of time.

We continued on our drive to Jasper, stopping at a couple of rivers and waterfalls on the way, and arrived in the evening to a town where the houses on the street go in such a random order that it took us a while to find our accommodation. We were staying in a sort of annexe to someone’s house and had a nice double room and lounge to chill out in. Jasper is like a mini, less busy version of Banff with fewer pubs but probably just as many restaurants (although they all seemed to serve exactly the same food). We were lucky enough to stumble across a good brewpub on our first night so we ate and drank in there.


Jasper day 1

The weather wasn’t particularly nice the next day so after our obscenely large breakfast we decided to head west to see Mount Robson (which is actually over the border in British Columbia) and do some walking. At the border of Alberta and BC we stopped at a really lovely quiet lake called Yellowhead Lake (the road was named the Yellowhead Highway). Even though it didn’t have the vibrant blue colour of the other lakes we had seen, this was definitely a favourite of ours and it helped that we were the only ones on the trail to the lake. Unfortunately it was still pretty overcast at that point so we lost the peak of the mountains behind the lake in our photos.




We got to Mount Robson, the highest peak in the Rockies, and its peak was also covered by cloud. It was also a disappointment to find out that the trails we had hoped to do were a lot longer than the tourist officer had led us to believe, so we decided to skip that and instead went onto Rearguard Falls where we were told we may be able to see some salmon spawning. Another nice spot, we didn’t see much salmon, but we did see lots of whitewater rafters on the rapids.



I was only a little bit jealous of their adventure. It was cold and I’ve never fancied rafting much because I just know that I would fall in given my luck and lack of balance.

We then drove to another waterfall – the Overlander Falls and did some nice trail walking around there.



We returned to Jasper earlier than expected so decided to drive up the local mountain Mount Edith Cavell. The road up to it is so winding and treacherous with a zillion potholes that it is only open 3 months of the year. At the very top they had a lovely walk around some glaciers and a tiny glacial lake at the bottom of them. The biggest of them was called Angel Glacier because it looks like an angel spreading its wings.



It was a biggy. The other glaciers were a lot smaller. Some silly people had gone off the path and were climbing to the bottom of the glacier, and as we started the walk back we heard the glacier crack a couple of times and were afraid that a big chunk was going to fall off on top of people. Luckily for them it didn’t move.

We headed back into town to get drunk and I got round to eating my elk burger that I had been looking forward to.


Jasper Day 2

We settled for a rather lighter breakfast than the day before and set off towards Lake Maligne a few miles north of town. En-route we visited Maligne Canyon which was awesome. The canyon was so deep and the waterfalls so powerful (and in some cases high) – we spent a long time just gazing at them. Unfortunately canyons aren’t the easiest things to take photographs of, you can never quite do them justice – hence no photo of Maligne Canyon here.

We arrived at Lake Maligne.



and it was a bit on the chilly side. When I heard that it was a 7-hour trip in a canoe just to get to Spirit Island (one of the most famous views in the Rockies) all thoughts of a couple of hours messing around in boats left my mind. It didn’t help that it was so overcast that the water didn’t look as turquoise as it normally did. We settled for getting on a motorised tour boat to the Island (where incidentally we were told that the temperature of the water never exceeded 4 degrees celcius and that if you fall in hypothermia sets in within about 15 minutes, which made me even more glad that I had bypassed the canoe option). The boat trip was very informative and also very entertaining thanks to a young tour guide who knew how to tell a good story. Unfortunately I’m not so good at remembering those stories, so I won’t try and repeat them here.

Spirit Island was as lovely as expected really. It certainly got me taking copious amounts of photographs such as this one:



It is set against such a magnificent backdrop: All Canadians reckon that if there was ever to be a meeting of the gods then this would be the venue. The tranquillity of the area really hits you – motorised boats are not allowed past a certain point (just past the island) to prevent noise pollution in the area. I can’t remember the exact details but there is no other lake in a National Park that allows a motor boat on its waters – its something to do with the boat company being there before the National Park system was actually set up, so therefore they are excluded from the normal rules. The boathouse is actually a heritage site would you believe, at the grand old age on 70.

Facts about Spirit Island: it is not actually an island as it is attached to the mainland by a spit, but from certain angles it looks like an island. The toilets on the island are the world’s only solar-powered flush toilets and are extremely ecologically sound - wastewater is run through a state-of-the-art filter where biological action creates effluent used to water and feed nearby spruce trees - and therefore they were extremely expensive to build (something ridiculous like $1 million each). And the island is named Spirit Island because a photographer once spent several days on the then anonymous island waiting for the right moment, the right light, to take the photograph which won him a national competition. He named it Spirit Island as he believed that it captured the true spirit of the Rockies.

On our way back to Jasper we stopped at the Fairmont Hotel where the Queen had recently stayed on her visit. We saw an elk, we wandered around the very expensive shops, and lazed about on a deck overlooking one of the lakes in the resort before heading back to town to play pool, eat and get drunk again.


Jasper to Savona

Woke up this morning and said goodbye to our hosts only to walk out into the garden and find a big mess. Their trees and bushes had been destroyed in the night by an elk! It had eaten most of the bush right outside our bedroom window, I have no idea how we didn’t hear the thing. I probably woke up thinking it was just Graham grunting!

Our drive to Savona was fairly uneventful – we went past Yellowhead Lake again and stopped there for a while, taking more photos as it was such a clear day and the reflections on the lake were a lot better than before.




also stopped to take less cloud-obscured pictures of Mount Robson.




We stopped off at a couple of places to watch spawning salmon – we saw both Sockeye and Coho salmon making their exhausting journey. In a couple of months most of them will be dead, having been eaten by bears or eagles or having found their place of birth, laid/fertilised their eggs and died of exhaustion.

We were supposed to spend 2-3 hours in Wells Grey Provincial Park, home of one of the tallest waterfalls in Canada (it is three times higher than Niagara), but we couldn’t for the life of us find the road to the entrance. We passed through the town of Clearwater (the gateway to the park) 3 times in different directions but we couldn’t find a sign to it or the tourist information office, so we gave up and I had a grumpy fit for about an hour.

We stopped in Kamloops to get some grub but didn’t hang around long. It didn’t actually look as bad as everyone says it is, but Graham just wanted to get on to our destination. Our destination being Savona, a tiny place in the middle of nowhere on Kamloops lake. The “town” consisted of a road with a general store and roadside diner at either end with a few houses and our hotel along the lakeshore. But it was nice eating takeaway pizza, drinking a bottle of wine and sitting on the lakeshore beach watching the sun go down – an extremely relaxing night.