Wednesday 21st August 2013, day 41 - Kelowna to Banff

Moose Tour part 2 - The Rockies

Day 6: Kelowna to Banff

We left Kelowna at 8:30am, and about forty-five minutes later stopped at a viewpoint near Vernon, overlooking one end of Kalamalka Lake. There was a brief rest stop somewhere along the lovely Mara Lake before continuing to Craigellachie: the place where, in 1885, the "Last Spike" of the Canadian Pacific Railway was driven in, connecting eastern Canada with British Columbia's Pacific coast and creating the country's first transcontinental railroad.

Lunch was on the shores of Revelstoke Lake, a dammed part of the Columbia River. A few of the group then went kayaking while the rest of us were driven about fifteen minutes further up the lake to Martha Creek Provincial Park, where we spent about an hour and a half just relaxing - somewhat uncomfortably on the rocky beach, but still in the warm sunshine by a beautiful lake. I went for a paddle: it was colder than the Okanagan, but a couple of people went for a brief dip.

After this we started getting into the mountains properly, as we rejoined the Trans-Canada Highway which we had left at Hope, and the next rest stop was at the Rogers Pass Discovery Center, in the Selkirk Mountains of Glacier National Park. We only stayed there for about twenty minutes and didn't go into the little museum, but there were telescopes, a few information boards and cute ground squirrels outside.

Somewhere between Rogers Pass and our next rest stop in the town of Golden we lost an hour, crossing time zones into Mountain Daylight Time. We arrived in the early evening at the beautifully mirror-like Emerald Lake, our first glacial one, in Yoho National Park. The name Yoho comes from the Cree word for awe and wonder, and the park is the smallest of the four adjoining national parks (Yoho, Kootenay, Jasper and Banff) which, along with three of BC's provincial parks, make up the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks World Heritage Site. A handful of people braved a brief swim in the lake, the two guys deciding to jump off the bridge instead of walking in from the shore, which was amusing :) As we were leaving we saw a deer in the car park, and we sat watching it for about five minutes until an arriving car scared it off. The final stop before Banff was still in Yoho NP, at the Natural Bridge, where the Kicking Horse River has created a natural bridge through solid rock. There is a gap but it's small enough to step across and the power of the water was impressive.

Crossing the Continental Divide (river systems east of which flow into the Atlantic Ocean, west of which to the Pacific) and into the province of Alberta, we arrived in Banff about twelve hours after leaving Kelowna. All twenty-one of us went for dinner at The Old Spaghetti Factory, haha. A table had been reserved but thankfully it wasn't quite so busy anyway, being quite late. It was something ridiculous like gone 11pm by the time we left and drove the several kilometres to the hostel.