We drove the Icefields Parkway between Jasper and Banff. It was about a 2.5 hour drive that featured the best wildlife sightings of the trip.
Mountain goats licking some rocks!
Baby bighorn sheep with their mama!
The crown jewel of our wildlife sightings: A black bear!
Overall, we saw almost all the animals on the Jr Ranger activity book except moose, beaver, and grizzly bears. We saw bald eagles and elk on other days. Annie was diligent about crossing them off in her booklet.
We stopped by the Columbia Icefield visitor center. They had a great little museum with information all about glaciers, the continental divide, and other cool geology stuff. Less cool was the very artsy movie. We thought from the poster that it was going to be about a glacier explorer, but it turned out to be about a boy who loses his special rock and then finds it again as an old man? There were no words and we left after 10 minutes, but that seemed to be the direction the plot was moving in.
There is the Columbia Icefield in the background! 100 years ago it was way bigger, filling the whole valley and covering what is now the parking lot. It is still as thick as the Eiffel Tower at it's thickest point. They have tours that take you out to walk on it, but we figured it wasn't the most kid compatible excursion. Next time!
Picnic lunch again! We ate a lot of Nutella this trip. There was too much on Isaac's hands to waste, so he got to eat it scraped off with a pretzel stick.
Quick stop at Bow Summit, the highest point on the Icefields parkway. It is under snow for 9 months of the year.
Trail girls
After a super long traffic jam caused by bridge construction, we arrived in Banff and settled into Two Jack Main Campground.
The tall pines were very distinctive. It made me feel like we had some privacy even though we were pretty close to other groups in this huge campground.
The kids set to work building this fairy village.
On Saturday morning, we set out to Johnston Canyon. It was a cool hike with boardwalks built into the side of cliffs running right by a beautiful glacial lake with mini waterfalls and beautiful pools all over the place. The only problem was that it was CROWDED. Banff is way more popular than Jasper because it is closer to more populated areas of Canada, and it was probably a mistake to visit it over the weekend.
Annie was my hiking buddy again. We spent a lot of time discussing river mermaids and how they would need the power to transform into fish so that they could go through the shallow areas.
Aaron probably had developed callouses on his shoulders by this point.
This two story pool was so beautiful! Perfect river mermaid turf.
Google Photos has a "magic eraser" feature now that removes people from the background of the picture! So check out Annie, totally alone!
At the end of hike there was a long line to the final viewpoint of the upper falls. Everyone wanted a photo op, so it was slow moving. We passed the time by having Annie get mad at Elliot for photo bombing her pictures of her little rock. Also watching some chipmunk antics.
The upper falls! It was... probably not worth waiting in the long line for this picture. We had seen quite a few waterfalls by this point, and it was a little underwhelming.
We had bribed the kids with ice cream for completing the hike, so we grabbed some boxes of cones and ice cream sandwiches and went to eat them by the Banff Springs Hotel. This place looks like a castle! It was built by the Canadian Pacific Railway in an effort to get more rich people to travel on the railroads. It originally opened in 1888 and had major additions in the early 1900's. We felt a little lowbrow with our grocery store ice cream on the lawn of the fancy pants hotel.
Isaac liked his ice cream.
A lot.
Around the back! We walked through the main floor as well. Awesome castle vibes throughout!
The next morning, we attended sacrament meeting at the Banff Branch before heading south.
We stopped by Lake Moraine on the way out of town. This is one of the most famous sites in the park, and it is featured on the Canadian twenty dollar bill. It would have been fun to walk around it, but we had a 7 hour drive ahead of us, so we just made a quick stop.
Do we look Canadian?
The only way to crop other people out of the pictures is to hop out on a rock
Another good discovery from our audio tour was the spiral train tunnels! Elliot was so intrigued that he convinced us to do a u-turn to go back and see them. It was so hard to build train tracks in the Canadian Rockies. One section of tracks had to climb too steep of an elevation change, which would be dangerous all the time but especially in icy weather. The engineer's solution was to make a spiral tunnel into the mountain so that they could climb the elevation change over a greater distance. There is an overlook where you can see the front and back of a train sticking out of different tunnels in the mountain as it goes around the loop.
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