World Trip – Stage 37, Lake Louise and Banff

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15-21 June

Lake Louise

Although we only stayed one night in Lake Louise, after our day trek on 17 June, we visited the village on two days earlier to pick up some bear spray.

Lake Louise is the highest settlement in Canada at 1,536m, three kilometres along the Trans-Canada Highway (No. 1), after the end of the Icefields Parkway.  We were expecting a village, but it only consists of a couple of hotels, a shopping mall, the old railway station, a petrol station, a visitors’ centre and some car parks. 

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The good news is that there are two good coffee shops, a great restaurant in the old railway station, and a friendly mountain gear shop, where you can RENT bear spray, only paying for the whole can if it’s been used. We reckoned that if we needed to use it, we would be more than happy to pay the exorbitant prices they charge in the mountains!

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There was also a very helpful young woman in said visitors’ centre, who explained where to return our hire car in Banff, as the morning we were due to do so, was the Banff marathons, with attendant road closures. She was surprised to hear that not only had we heard of Reading in England, but Lynne had gone to her old school there!

The actual Lake Louise is a beautiful turquoise lake fed by glacier melt at one end, with the grand Chateau Lake Louise at the other end. 

Banff

Banff is nearly twice the size of Jasper and much busier, receiving 4.5m visitors each year. It was founded in the 1880s as a spa town along the Canadian Pacific Railway Line and named by Lord Strathcona after his home town in Aberdeenshire. 

Certainly you could be mistaken for thinking that you were in Scotland as you admire the lovely Cascade Gardens in town. Banff also houses a Park Museum, which allowed us to get as close as we wanted to some of the wildlife, but of the stuffed variety. 

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Banff offers outdoor enthusiasts many pursuits, but with weather of torrential rain and temperatures hovering around the 6C mark, for most of our three days there, we were very selective and caught up with chores and rest following our two strenuous hikes. 

We did manage a 10km walk on trails around Banff, avoiding the rain. The Bow Falls are magnificent from the South side of the river, but less impressive from the Surprise Corner Viewpoint, on the other side as you don’t see the depth of the drop from above. 

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We set off on a trail, through the open forests after Surprise Corner Viewpoint and were surprised to find ourselves completely alone, except for some mothers and baby elk munching bushes by the river’s edge. A large area in the forest was closed off to allow elks to calve undisturbed by ramblers, as the elk can get quite aggressive to protect their young. 

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The path became quite narrow running between the steep side of a mountain and the river: nowhere to escape an aggressive elk, so we decided that safety was paramount and turned back. This allowed us to visit the Falls from the south side, which more than compensated for our aborted trail.

There were plenty of restaurants and coffee shops which didn’t disappoint – plenty of English young women too. One of them, Poppy, not only shared some tips on travelling in Costa Rica, but treated us to a cup of coffee, so impressed was she, when she heard of our trip.

We were up early for our train journey back to Vancouver and we saw blue sky and the mountains surrounding Banff for the first time, but it was still very cold. 

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Our Rockies’ experience 

Our experience has probably been marred by the cold, wet weather, which obscured some of the views. We enjoyed fantastic hikes and gorgeous views and some intermittent sunshine; everyone we met on the trail was friendly. When the sky was clear, the view from our motel at The Crossing was impressive. We enjoyed the tranquility of the mountains, the flora and the spectacular lakes.

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We found it expensive and felt we had to pay for everything, sometimes at exorbitant prices, even taking account of its remoteness. 

Whilst the Park is geared for tourists, it seems that’s more for organised groups and it’s not straightforward to find the information for independent travellers; lots of marketing and outline information: too commercialised.

We’ve been hiking in Patagonia, New Zealand and the Himalayas and for folks prepared to travel long distances, we’d recommend hiking there, in preference to the Canadian Rockies, especially as there’s little danger of encountering bears there.