Home»All Photographs»19.07.13.Road Trip 3-Banff.Lake Louise to Golden, BC

Sun, July 13 -Continued from Strathmore, AB
We arrived in Banff, AB Canada after driving several hours from Strathmore, AB. I had been to Banff and seen Lake Louise and the Canadian Rockies in 1965. It was beautiful then and it is beautiful today. One disappointment is that thousands of free roaming Caribou have disappeared. Apparently they were almost totally wiped out by an avalanche that killed most of the adult males.

After entering Banff National Park we went to Banff Townsite where we walked around and had lunch. The town caters to tourists and is quite cosmopolitan.
Compared to my first visit, there are many more tourists and serious cyclists... but never so many as to take away from the experience (unlike Yosemite National Park).
After visting the village of Banff we headed up the Bow Ridge Parkway where we met Cheryl & Paul (Chuck) from Ogdon, UT. The Parkway follows the Bow River and is very scenic, framed by mountains and filled with lakes and ponds. The water is the rich blue-green characteristic of melted glaciers.

We went north to Silver City and then rejoined the Trans-Canada Highway which took us North to Lake Louise. Lake Louise is, a world-class destination which attracts people of all stripes. The Lake itself is picture perfect, framed by a glacier at one end, a hotel at the other end and mountains on either side.
(It would not be until the next day that we would discover Moraine Lake...see next gallery... which in our opinion is even more spectacular.)

From there we headed north and west through avalanche country. A highlight was a railroad tunnel exhibit showing how a series of circular tunnels were used to enable trains to climb the rugged terrain.

It was getting late so we went west to Golden,BC and spent the night outside the park at the Ponderosa Inn Motel. At the motel we met two couples from Calgary who who were taking a motorcycle trip through Western Canada. They highly recommended that we go to Vancouver and said that the Calgary Stampede is "awesome ... I've seen it 50 times."