The Vips in Canada: Part I
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2011
We've always had a fascination with Canada. A land of s p a c e, of mountains, snow, wildlife, rivers, and, if I'm totally honest, Due South. This year we managed to put enough money aside for a holiday - a once in a lifetime expedition to somewhere we had always wanted to go.
So we did, to the town of Banff, Alberta. Not through a travel agency as we couldn't afford that, but through careful application of the internet. We booked flights, arranged a rental car, and found a small B&B that had its own kitchen so we could cook for ourselves in the evenings.
Then it was just the waiting until June for the time to arrive.
There's not a lot to be said about the flights. We flew to Calgary, which is the closest airport to Banff, and eight hours each way. The flight there was bearable, the flight back caused us to swear we would never fly with Thomas Cook long-haul ever again. 'Nuff said. We picked up the car and drove the hour and a half to the B&B, checked in and attempted to fight the jet lag. We made it to half six (almost falling asleep in our pizza) before collapsing on our bed in our little room. A note – something that the tourist brochures fail to mention is that you have to buy a pass to enter the National Park system. If you are staying more than a couple of days it works out cheaper to buy a yearly pass, and that costs 67.70 CAD (as of 2010) each. Still, for what you are helping preserve it is well worth it.
Saturday
Given our early bedtime it wasn't a surprise we awoke at the ludicrous hour of 5am. However, as it was June it meant we could take advantage of the early sunrise and go for a wander down to the Bow river in Banff's town park. In the early morning mist there was nobody but us to disturb the deer who were casually cropping the grass. We headed back for breakfast of croissants and boiled eggs before heading up to the Banff Gondola. This is a cable car up to the top of Sulphur Mountain, which towers above the town nestled in the valley. You can see for miles and miles and the views were staggering.
We were back down by the time most of the tourists had made it to the bottom (layabeds! 
), and wandered back down to town to pick up our hats, which we had left in a jet-lagged stupor at the pizzeria last night. At that point, we got distracted by a sign for a new brewery which was next door. They served good beer. Really good beer, including a melt-in-the-mouth porter which meant that I was more than a little tipsy by three in the afternoon! We headed back to the B&B and sobered up by taking a walk up Tunnel Mountain, which is a lot smaller than Sulphur Mountain. It took us only an hour to the peak.
Tunnel Mountain got its name from the train planners, who planned to blast a tunnel through it to create the railway. When the builders got here, they decided they may as well just divert around it. So, despite the name there is no tunnel through Tunnel Mountain. Personally, I prefer the local First Nations name for it: Sleeping Buffalo. If you have a look at the pictures we took from the top of Sulphur Mountain you can see the shape of it. See what I mean?
Finally, before falling asleep at 8.30 we managed to book ourselves on a tour the following day.
Sunday
Banff is a town created specifically for tourists, so the tourist tours run all week long. We had gone for the all day, see-as-much-as-you-can tour on the grounds that we could then go back and visit the places we liked best of all later in the week. This could show us the highlights and the places we wouldn't have even considered. It was definitely worth it.
We slept through until six, so we were getting better. We boarded the minibus and collected the other passengers from various pick-up points around town. This was going to be a long day, but the sky was a cloudless blue, the sun was shining and we were on holiday! In Canada! How would we be anything but incredibly excited? 
The tour started by driving us to Lake Louise, up Highway 1. Highway 1 is the Trans-Canada Highway, which spans the length of the country, often travelling parallel to the railroad (which played its own part in the colonisation and unity of the Canada territories).
Lake Louise is blue. It's the sort of blue that makes you think that your eyes have gone funny1. However, the water doesn't look that blue from water level. It looks a little blue but nothing out of the ordinary. You go down to the water's edge and comment on how perfectly clear the water is. It's only when you climb the paths up the hills (which we did later in the week) that you get the full 'blue' extent.
It is also incredibly still, and, apart from the tourists, quiet. In the hollows of the surrounding mountains, the only movement is the canoes that you can rent at exorbitant prices on the left hand side. There will be streams and glacier run off, but they don't touch the overall stillness of the lake.
Next on the trip was an odd one: Spiral Tunnel. When the railroad was initially built it had to come down the Kicking Horse pass. This is far too steep for a railroad. Despite this, they built it anyway with a 4.5% gradient as a temporary line (which ended up being the mainline for 25 years). Coming down this line was always a risk, and trains would lose control and have accidents on a regular basis, despite the emergency lines built into it.
To replace this dangerous descent, in 1909 they opened the Spiral Tunnels, based on similar designs in the Alps. Trains enter tunnels in the surrounding mountainsides and descend down a gradual circle and emerge 50ft lower. Although you can't enter the tunnels or get a great look as they are still working tunnels, if you get lucky you can watch a train going through or coming out of a tunnel entrance. With some of the long freight trains the front emerges before the end of the train enters!
We only had about fifteen minutes at the Tunnels before heading back to the bus and driving up to Takakkaw Falls. Takkakaw Falls is the second highest waterfall in Canada (if I remember correctly), and is not somewhere I would have liked to drive in a minibus! Switchbacks2 abound, and the driver was regaling us with tales of storms bringing down trees and driving mishaps (thankfully none of these things happened to us)!. We walked the last couple of hundred yards over the river and to the base of the waterfall. The water here comes straight from a glacier and is so cold that the air around the falls gets colder and colder the closer you get.
The descent through Kicking Horse pass and through the Yoko National Park is still a high gradient even on the roads, and has some fantastic views. As you pass out of the National Park, restrictions on what activities can take place are relaxed so you start to see more tourist attractions, such as white water rafting on the Yoho River3.
Finally, we emerged onto the valley4 at the town of Golden, having crossed through the Rocky Mountains. That valley actually follows the Rockies down their entire length. We cross the plain and ascend once more to the Golden ski resort. Ski? In the summer? Ah. Now I get to tell you about the real purpose of the whole trip: lunch.
The ski resort is a mountain bike track in the summer season, and we have lunch at the very top of the mountain, again using a gondola to reach the restaurant at the top. Lunch is served outdoors, looking out over incredible scenery, and being harassed by the golden mantled ground squirrels, who nab anything dropped. You should not feed any of the wildlife here, but sometimes it's hard to avoid whilst you're eating.
Speaking of wildlife, I was lying when I said the real purpose was lunch (good though it was). It was really to see Boo, the grizzly bear who lives in a large enclosure at the resort. Boo, with his brother Cari, was orphaned by poachers as a cub. Usually cubs are shot if their mother is killed, as it takes over four years for a cub to gain enough skills to survive on its own in the wild. Boo and Cari got lucky. Unfortunately Cari died in hibernation due to a natural complication two years later, but Boo is still living in the enclosure. He emerges5 and unconcernedly scratches himself on a tree before lumbering over to our side, where a keeper has thrown over some fistfuls of dandelions to entice him closer.
It's hard to describe. We didn't get that close as he is still as wild as he can be in such an environment, but you could still see the powerful shoulders that create the grizzly 'hump' and his long, thick digging claws. Everyone said he was bigger than they expected, although I think I was expecting some sort of giant that stood six foot at the shoulder so thought he was smaller. He is still only an adolescent though, so who knows, he may be bigger in a few years.
After all this, it was just a drive home back through the scenery we had passed earlier. Along the way we were told about the fungus, carried by the Mountain Pine Beetle that is killing huge swathes of the British Columbian forests. They are working hard to prevent it spreading but with limited success. Alberta is worried that it might get across the border into the National Parks. The recent cold winters have slowed the spread, but there is still a lot to do to prevent the loss of thousands of acres of forest.
Nearly two and a half hours later, we're back in Banff. It's been a long day so we figure the best thing to do is to head to the Hot Springs that we saw near the gondola entrance the previous day.
Not content with the amount of information we'd absorbed that day, we then drove to the historical beginnings of Banff at the original hot springs that were found by the railway workers at the opposite end of town. Although the building is currently no longer in operation, we wandered the boardwalk at the back and read the information boards. It did smell of sulphur, but there had to be a reason the mountain got its name!
4anhaga tells me that Golden is in the valley called the Rocky Mountain Trench between the Rockies and the Columbia mountains, which are just as spectacular as the Rockies.5Apparently this was the first time he has been spotted in four days & the trip organisers were starting to really worry as they have a refund policy if you don't see him!
