Banff/Lake Louise

Typical oddly eroded limestone peaks in the Banff area

Kristen looking down onto Lake Louise from Big Beehive

Borgeau Lake

The spectacular Moraine Lake

Banff is about a 4-5 hour drive from Glacier NP, but it looks completely different.  The most striking mountains are capped with limestone, which is a brilliant bright white, and erodes in very odd ways.  Some mountains look like they’re made of Legos, with layer upon layer of odd shapes protruding everywhere.

We had our own names for some of the peaks - “trapdoor mountain” for the peak above the town of Banff (it really did form like a trapdoor, a slab of rock tilting up toward the sky), “mount melty” for a series of peaks that had insanely eroded faces, “terrace mountain” for one peak that had chunks broken off its top, forming flat spaces that grass was growing on, and so on.  Why did we make up our own names for the mountains?  Because the attractions in the area are named terribly.  Many, if not most of the lakes and peaks we came across had some boring person’s name.  Lake Louise.  Lake O’Hara.  Nigel Creek.  These are not names that inspire the imagination, despite the fact that they are SPECTACULAR places.  Especially after we had come from Glacier NP, where they have totally awesome names like “Two Medicine” or “Siyeh Pass”.

And that wasn’t the only point of differentiation from Glacier NP.  I’ll save our thoughts on Canada’s national park system for another post, but suffice it to say Banff NP was extremely ‘touristy’.  Where Glacier was rugged and raw, Banff is a posh ski town with stores that sell Gucci.  We couldn’t help but create a system to decide how in tune with the wilderness around it a place is (specifically in Grizzly country).  Where Glacier was accessible bear spray, backpackers, ponchos, layers, bear safety enforcement, and rugged trails, Banff was tucked in collared cotton shirts, unprepared hikers carrying no water, no warm layers (and up on mountain passes it often gets really cold really quickly), bear bells, and people hiking silently.  Moving from Glacier to Banff was a pretty serious change of pace.

That said, we really liked the town of Banff.  It has great coffee shops, grocery stores, and a few (if you can find them) cheap options for dinner.  It has a bit of the same feel as Aspen.  And the surrounding mountains are spectacular.

We think we got a pretty good feel for the place in our few days there:

Day 1: hikes in the Lake Louise area.  Lake Louise is an absolutely gorgeous, milky blue lake (the milky color is the result of ‘glacial till,’ or pulverized rock, draining into the lake).  It was the first lake of this color I’d ever seen, and it reminded Kristen of the glacial rivers she’d seen in Patagonia.  We hiked up to the Lake Agnes Teahouse to eat lunch (the area above Lake Louise contains two alpine tea houses).  The teahouse itself was a disappointment – spaced out staff and high prices, but the scenery was great.  We then hiked over Big Beehive and on to the Plain of the Six Glaciers trail, stopping for tea at the more inaccessible and rustic Plain of the Six Glaciers Teahouse.  This second teahouse was great – the staff packs in all their ingredients, they have no electricity, and you really feel like you’re in a remote part of the woods.  We hiked out in the late afternoon for a total trip of about 10-12 miles.

Day 2: hiked to Borgeau Lake.  We were a bit tired from the previous day, so the moderate hike surprisingly took it out of us.  The lake itself was nice, and we had fun chasing Pikas around on the scree-filled shore.

Day 3: rainy and cold.  We drove briefly up to the spectacular (even more so than Lake Louise) Moraine Lake to look around, but it was so cold we left within 10 minutes.  So we took the rest of the day off, hanging around the town of Banff.

Day 4: hiked at Lake O’Hara.  So spectacular it merits its own post.