Running Out Of Witty Headlines, But Something With Rocky Mountains.

Hello. You probably thought you’d heard the last of us. But we flew to the Rocky Mountains, and you do not fly to the Rocky Mountains and get back without pictures. So, before we board the plane back to Germany on Wednesday (and, boy, are we counting minutes), here’s one final round of stuff. It should have Han Solo in it, but it doesn’t. Sorry, Han. 

We flew to Calgary. The take-off was brilliant, because it was a clear day and we had amazing views of Vancouver and the mountains. It was like using Google Earth, slowly zooming out, only without the goofiness and lo-fi quality of Google Earth. It was really, really good. Few flights are, but this one was. Albert was reasonably good on the flight, just a little bored because he couldn’t really run around. Here’s to hoping he will be as civilized on the flight to Stuttgart… Calgary, then, looked a bit like the opposite of Vancouver, at least from above. It’s surrounded by flat, dry grassland, and looks pretty bleak. It was also really hot there, around 28° when we landed. We kept our eyes peeled to see a sign of the Fort McMurray fires, but didn’t see anything. I’m happy to report, it’s not our eyes’ fault – the fires are simply too far north.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This trip marks the first time we used AirBnB. It was good. In Calgary, we rented a small house for two nights, in a very quiet neighborhood. It was eerie, opening the window and not hearing bars, cars, drunk idiots, busses, garbage trucks and police sirens. (In Vancouver, we hear all that even with the windows closed, so…) We went exploring for a bit, visited downtown Calgary, the Olympic Plaza and strolled through a few parks. It’s a city, what can I say. I’m happy we didn’t spend more time there. Plus, they have proper Sundays where everything’s closed, which we’re not used to anymore and which sucks when you only have a Sunday to spend there.

So, we happily packed up our things and drove to Canmore. The drive alone was worth the flight, I’d say. It’s a 100km of dead straight highway, leading from the plains up into the Rockies. Brilliant views, the mountains are majestic. I guess you never get to appreciate the Alps like that, because you never see them like this. Albert was asleep, so we didn’t stop to take pictures, but just take our word for it – if you’re ever in Calgary and only have a day to spend, rent a car and drive to Banff. Drink a coffee, then drive back. Way better than hanging around downtown.

We rented another small house in Canmore. This one, we later found out, belonged to a proper Olympian. I took pictures of it when we were still in the process of unpacking, so there’s a mess, but take a look:

 

 

 

 

 

Gas stove! Rain shower! Steam Bath! Custom Furniture! A Buffalo on the wall (the poor thing)! State-of-the-art heating and ventilation! A Netflix-capable TV! 🙂 And that view! The place was awesome. We instantly fell in love with it, I think I could easily live and get old there. If we could afford it. Which we can’t.

Canmore is a cute little town with a few thousand inhabitants. We lived a bit outside, so it was very quiet again. It was an ideal starting point for the few short hikes we did in the ten days we had there.

 

 

 

 

On the first day, we just went shopping, exploring the town and checking out playgrounds. We went to the tourist information, got some maps, and then went home and made plans. Which, of course, was all pretty much for nothing, because that night, it started to snow. Snow sucks for going on hikes with a toddler. It’s okay for artsy-fartsy mountain photography, though.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m leaving out half the photos, here, by the way, otherwise I’d have to make another trilogy, and I promised not to. The bad weather was really only half bad, and it only lasted a day. So the next morning, we did our first ‘test hike’ with the carrier backpack, up to the Grassi Lakes. It’s an easy route, they say (no, it really is, steep but easy), but at the end of it, I couldn’t understand how I made it through Iceland with that much weight on my back. My legs were all shaky on the way down. It’s crazy how old I am.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Albert looks quite grumpy in all of these, huh. He had a pretty foul mood because he was teething badly. I think it was good timing. At least, he was a bit distracted while we were out and about. And of course he threw any stone he could find into any puddle he could find. It was almost like slapstick, him walking out of the house in the morning, stopping at literally the first piece of gravel he saw, pointing, shouting ‘STONE!’ and then picking it up, only to throw it away for the next bigger piece of gravel he found. Every time we left the house. Every. Single. Time. *sigh*

And then, one evening, we sit in the living room and he starts saying ‘Hau! Hau!’, which is his word for dog. We didn’t pay him much attention, at first, but then he got more excited, pointing to the window, still shouting ‘Hau! Hau!’, to which, of course, we dutifully said ‘Mhmm, is there a dog outside? Yes? Someone is walking his dog?’ And then we finally did him the favor to look out of the window. Somebody wasn’t walking their dog. There was no dog. I’ve seen dogs. This is not one of them.

 

We had a long get-together with Google Images that night, trying to figure out if it’s a wolf or a coyote. We later confirmed it’s a coyote. Sorry. Not as exciting as a wolf, I know. Well, let me get this out of the way right now: we also didn’t see any bears. But I can steal Erik’s and Marie’s bear story from only a few days later and put it here, just so there is one – because they saw two of them at once, Grizzlies, in the parking area where they wanted to start on a trail. There, now, you know that, too.

The next trip was to Grotto Canyon. The weather went from bright sunshine to completely overcast the second we stepped out of the car. The trail is marked with signs all of three times over the 7km – at the very beginning, after 100m, and after 300m. Which led to us walking in circles five times in the first five hundred meters. Which was then not entirely made up for by the canyon, which was nice for a bit, but just not nice enough to justify all the trouble. 🙂 Also, walking over very rocky ground for hours with the carrier is really not fun. Shaky legs all over again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We ate some lunch at the upper end of the canyon, which isn’t really an end at all, it just widens into a valley there. We saw hoodoos, but they weren’t really impressive. We also saw what a friendly old lady referred to as chipmunks, but what turned out to be squirrels. A striped ground squirrel. Chilean maybe? I don’t remember. They’re cute and curios, and when they suspect you might have something to eat for them, they’ll literally sit on your foot and wait. All in all, Grotto Canyon was nice enough, but nothing to really write home about. (Which is a funny thing to say, after just writing home about it for two paragraphs.)

Next day, next adventure. We wanted to do something short and easy, and found a list of chariot-friendly trails online. We quickly decided on Troll Falls, apparently a really nice walk even for small kids, with an exciting waterfall at the end and plenty to see along the way. The drive there had some really nice views. Also in the photos below: the current state of affairs when we try to assemble for a group selfie.

 

 

 

Then we started walking towards the waterfalls. A pretty uneventful hike, although we got the idea that ‘chariot-friendly’ is not the word we would use to describe it. ‘Barely tolerating chariots’ is more like it. Or ‘chariot-friendly, if your chariot looks a bit like this‘. Or ‘chariot-friendly until you leave the parking area’. So we parked the chariot at a tree and walked the last bit without it. Albert needed some workout, anyway. On to the waterfall!

Well. Okay. To be fair, waterfalls don’t have it easy with us. I’ve been to Iguazu, Gaga has seen Niagara Falls, we both had our fair share of impressive waterfalls on Iceland… the average Canadian waterfall does not play in the same league, even if you see people of all ages terribly excited at even the hint of water running down some stone. So on the scale between a trickle and Gullfoss, I’d say Troll Falls play in the Primary School League B-team. Albert didn’t even look at it. And why would he? There were stones and a small brook to throw them in.

 

 

 

 

 

The way more interesting part of the hike came on the loop back, where we took a detour through Hay Meadows. That was pretty cool. And the birch groves along the way were nice, too. Albert wanted back into his stroller and quickly fell asleep, so we rested for a while, took in the vistas, and when he woke up, we threw more stones in more water, saw some deer not too far away, and ended up completely happy with how the day had turned out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After that day was both easy and nice, we decided to challenge ourselves a bit more on the next, and finally entered Banff National Park in order to do the Consolation Lakes trail further up in the mountains. Which the tourist information lady simply said ‘Nope’ to, because the access road there was still closed for all the snow and the bears. That threw us off a little bit, but then the lady suggested we do the Lake Agnes trail instead, it starts at Lake Louise and then goes up into the mountains. Its difficulty was marked as ‘medium’, which we found a bit worrying because we’d only done easy trails up to the point and had found them hard enough for our taste. But then she said ‘Aaaah, for you Germans, our Medium is still Easy.’ and that offended our pride just enough to send us on our way.

 

 

 

 

Lake Louise is impressive. It’s such a deep turquoise, and it’s huge. It’s also crowded, because it only takes a minute to get from the parking area to the lake shore, where you can buy some fast food, stroll around the lake, take all the touristy pictures and then get back in the car and never even break a sweat. We happily left most of the tourists behind and started our ascend. The tourist information lady had suggested we walk only about a third of the trail, until we got to a switchback with a nice view of Lake Louise, but that didn’t do it for us, of course. We continued up, made a short stop at Mirror Lake, where my favorite lens decided to kick the bucket and not open the shutter anymore, and then climbed the rest of the way to Lake Agnes. Both Mirror and Agnes are beautiful, very serene and idyllic settings. There were more of the striped ground squirrels, a bird we don’t know, quite a few more tourists (it was Sunday)… and stones, of course. You know. For throwing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The hike was pretty long, but it was easier than we had feared and it was well worth it. It was the best one we got to do. I’m grateful the lady suggested it. The next day, we went up to Sulphur Mountain. In a massively overpriced gondola. I don’t really know if it’s worth going up there, but if you ever find yourself in the situation that you want to, just walk up. It’s probably boring, from what we were able to see from the gondola, but you’ll save 42$ per person. Take that money and go have a lovely breakfast at the Communitea Café in Canmore, instead.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There’s a lot of stairs up there, 368 to be exact. Proud daddy that I am, I counted just how many of those Albert scaled himself, happily squealing at every new flight – he climbed 203 steps before he wanted in the backpack.

For the afternoon, we’d looked up another chariot-friendly hike. Luckily, Albert fell asleep before it really got started, because this one wasn’t even barely tolerating chariots, it was outright hating them. It should have been a short hike, and I ventured on alone, thinking I’d take some nice pictures of Stewart Canyon. But it became obvious pretty fast that the short hike wouldn’t be short at all, and I finally turned around at this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

(We saw a few mountain sheep. Bear-fodder, so to speak. But the bears didn’t bite.) We spent a bit of time throwing stones into Lake Minnewanka, drove home and then spent the last day in and around Canmore, mentally preparing for the flight back and leaving the beautiful Rockies behind. But not, of course, before throwing some last stones into the Bow River in Canmore, going to the playground one last time, and seeing two elk while we were there. Elk, it turns out, are enormous. And I could not possibly finish even one blog post without at least one or two sunsets.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While we were in Canmore, I discovered cold-brewed coffee for myself. There’s a really good blog post on why it’s good and how to make it, over on Jamie Oliver’s blog, if you’re interested. In a nutshell, the taste is way less bitter than when you just let hot-brewed coffee sit in the fridge for a while. It’s very smooth, perfectly clear, and very refreshing over some ice with a hint of maple syrup. You could even use it as coffee essence, filling it up with hot water to get a hot cold-brewed coffee, which is a bit decadent, I guess. Try it out yourself, just fill a mug with cold, filtered water, add the coffee grounds, let it sit for 24 hours and then filter it until you see no more traces of oil, grime or grounds in there. Pour over some ice and enjoy!

 

We’re back in Vancouver now. We’re killing time meeting as many people as we can, many of them we probably won’t see again in the foreseeable future. Today, we finally made it to Medina, something we’ve been trying to check off on our list for a long time now. The food was everything we’d hoped for. Including the waffles. Albert thought so, too.

 

 

In other news, the weather is shit again. Vancouver is all like ‘You suckers wanna go? You better go now, because the weather will stay bad until you do, and everyone will start to hate you very soon, because it’s your fault summer isn’t here, yet.’ In an attempt to get back at the city in a major way, we’re in the process of completing a very wicked revenge plan: throwing 170.000 cubic meters of gravel, pebbles, stones and rocks into the Lost Lagoon, thereby draining it, making it unattractive for tourists, rendering the resident ducks, geese, swans, herons, turtles, otters, beavers and racoon homeless, in one word: robbing it of all its value for the city.

It’s about time we left.