Banff and Jasper National Parks

We had been to both National Parks last year, and surprise, they haven't changed all that much since! We travelled via Calgary where we did some wholefood shopping and made another visit to the Walmart Supercenter. Besides that we bypassed Calgary as apparently its main attractions are undercover/underground shopping and the 1988 Olympic venues, both not really our favourites. Shopping, well that's a no brainer, and the Olympic sites were used for the winter olympics so their main feature is not so obvious in summer.

  Our site near Banff

Anyway, we moved on and had a beautiful campsite at the Bow Valley Provincial Park, some 20 or so km's to Banff.  Next morning into Banff which is of course highly touristy yet still in a tolerable way. We managed to stay for a couple of hours before cold and rainy weather moved in and us out of Banff. The road from here to Lake Louise was still impressive despite the rather poor weather. At Lake Louise we went for a 3 hour hike up the mountain to  a small lake with amazing views over Lake Lousie and the surrounding mountains.

The next day the weather was still rather poor yet better than last year when we had a snow storm here in August. Still, the Glacier Highway is impressive, sometimes breathtaking, glaciers all over the place, waterfalls, bighorn sheep, mountain goats......

The next station was Jasper where we had to discover that our favourite Greek restaurant from last year had a new chef. The food was still ok, but we had hoped for a feast. Well, tough luck and it was back to home-cooking. We stayed at the Jasper campground for 5 nights, waiting for a spare part for our heater that is rather impulsive in deciding when to heat and when not to heat. Unfortunately, quite often it doesn't start up in the morning and we were at 1600 m in the mountains with all those glaciers.

 Biking near Jasper

We used that time for a couple of bike rides around the area, little bit of sightseeing at the Maligne Canyon ( which we had visited last year, so it was not as impressive now as it was then), some reading and housekeeping.

Our favourite spot for lunch

After five days the package still not had arrived so we had it forwarded to some village near the Alaskan border. Maybe we'll get it there!


From Jasper it's off the Dawson Creek, mile 0 of the Alaska Highway.