The only thing worse than a strong head wind when towing a trailer is a strong side wind, and we’ve had to endure both on the first two days of our 102-day Trans-Canada Journey.
Of course, we haven’t reached Canada yet. That won’t happen until Saturday. It’s going to take us three days just to get to the Great White North, the first two of which took us from our home in Aurora, Colorado, north to Sheridan, Wyoming, and on west to Anaconda, Montana. The winds have been howling the entire way, causing vegetation to bend over like the Hunchback of Notre Dame and flags to stick out like they’ve OD’d on Viagra. The low-riding trailer has been following faithfully but our tow vehicle, a tall Nissan Xterra, has been rocking like a party van as it gets wind-buffeted down the pavement.
Hopefully, when we emerge from the flats and head into the mountains, things will calm down and I won’t have to keep white-knuckling the steering wheel to keep our progress on the straight and narrow.
Some folks like commercial RV park campgrounds. We don’t.
Last night we stayed in a highly rated RV Park near Butte, Montana. It had all the amenities one could ask for – full hookups, level, pull-through sites, a picnic table and grill, clean restrooms with showers and free (but pitifully slow) Wi-Fi. The staff was friendly, our site had grass and the nearest neighbor was a full ten feet away. For folks who use their RV as a mobile motel, it was great, and nobody spoiled our fantasy of privacy by waving or stopping to chat as they walked by.
Tonight, we’re in a U.S. Forest Service campsite in the Kootenai National Forest. Our site slopes a bit sideways requiring us to prop up one wheel to level the trailer. We have to fetch water from a spigot 25 yards away and the restroom is a one-hole pit toilet located up the hill. But we’re surrounded by nature in the form of trees, vegetation and wildlife, which the signs suggest may include those big, furry ursine critters. The nearest neighbor is a John Elway pass away, and we have birds chirping with the occasional squirrel and chipmunk scurrying past. Everyone who has walked by our site has either waved or stopped by for a brief chat.
Of course, it would be nice if we had even pitifully slow Wi-Fi, but with no cell service out here, even teens have no reason not to look up and admire their surroundings.
After three days of driving north from Colorado, we finally made it to British Columbia. We entered the Great White North at Roosville, the second busiest Canadian entry point from the state of Montana. There was nobody ahead of us in line and nobody behind. Apparently few folks go from Montana to Canada on a Saturday morning, and the border guard seemed grateful to have something to do.
We assured him we carried no guns, tasers, mace or pepper spray, and he didn’t ask about any beer, wine, meats or vegetables we might be smuggling in. The whole border crossing took less time that it takes to clear a California agricultural bug stop.
We’re diving right into the Canadian way of life. I set the Garmin to kilometres (yes, we’re even using Canadian spellings), which was great for monitoring our speed, but distances suddenly seemed incredibly longer. I reset our indoor/outdoor thermometer to register Celsius, and we can no longer look at it and tell if we’re comfortable or not.
“It says it’s 25 outside. Is that good or bad?” Dianne asked.
We filled up with fuel at the local Who-Knows-What gas station, sloshing in enough litres of fuel that if it were the same number in gallons, it would overflow the tank in our neighbor’s motor mansion. And the final price in Canadian dollars would have made a good down payment on that motorhome. Fortunately, with the favorable exchange rate, everything comes at about 30% off.
We’re now tucked away in our campsite in Kootenay National Park outside Radium Hot Springs. There’s a fresh, 24-pack of Kokanee beer tucked away in the fridge and we’ve got a 120-volt electrical hookup, so we can run the air conditioner. We just need to figure out if 25 degrees is hot or not.
Our first night in Canada was at the Redstreak (not to be confused with “Red Stripe,” the Jamaican beer) Campground in Kootenay National Park. Unlike American national park campgrounds, this one boasted eight different loops with varying amenities. It reminded me of our Army Corp of Engineers campgrounds.
We had a 120-volt hookup onsite, but unlike some of the other loops, no water or sewer. The bathroom, which had free showers, was directly across the street from our site. Not only was that very convenient for those of us who don’t have an onboard bathroom, but it also allowed us to chat with fellow campers on their way to or from the facilities.
One woman from Vernon, British Columbia, was enamored with our U.S. and Canada state/province decal maps. I explained that where we come from, all new owners are required to put them on their trailers to show where they’ve been. Using our maps as a reference, she finger-drew where she and her husband had been on their Canada and U.S. adventures.
“We like traveling in your country” she told us, “because gas is so much cheaper.”
Sunday morning, we departed Kootenay and headed toward Banff National Park in Alberta. Less than 15 kilometres up the highway, we passed a grizzly dining along the roadway. If that happened in Grand Teton or Yellowstone National Parks, traffic would have come to a standstill as folks poked cameras or their kids out car windows to get a shot. The three cars ahead of us on the road didn’t even slow down.
While the campground seemed like Corps of Engineer sites, driving through the length of Kootenay National Park seemed like motoring through an American national forest. There were a few scenic pullouts with interpretive placards, but nothing special.
We turned off onto the road to Lake Louise and were immediately greeted by something I’ve never seen in an American national park – guys in dayglow green jumpsuits directing traffic. Seeing our trailer, the traffic coordinator motioned us forward. But I was following Garmie (the voice on our Garmin navigator) who said we should turn left in 200 metres.
Now, I’m used to her saying things like “turn in 200 feet,” which is like right now, so I turned at the next intersection. We proceeded up the wrong street to where it dead-ended. I tried to save face by stopping at the corner gas station for a fill up. Back on the street, this time I followed the guy in the dayglow jumpsuit.
Lake Louise has two campgrounds. One is for hard-sided units only and has 120-volt hookups. The other, for tents and canvas popup trailers, has no hookups and lies surrounded by a 7,000-volt electric fence, designed to keep the bears out. We opted to live dangerously and reserved a site in the hard-sided section.
“Do you get many bear maulings here?” I asked the lad at the campground check-in booth.
“We don’t like to talk about that,” he replied in a dead-serious voice.
After sitting on our butts for 1,200 miles, we decided our first full day at Lake Louise would be a hiking day. We started out on a trail that parallels the river behind camp.
After a short detour through the tent campground (we wanted to see how the other half lives), we headed up the Louise Creek Trail to the lake. We met only one other hiker on the trail, and he was carrying a can of bear spray. So were we.
Just short of the lake, the trail passes by a parking lot where dayglow-clad attendants were directing traffic. I chatted with one between cars.
“Saturday was the biggest day we’ve ever had up here,” he told me, “and Sunday was even busier. Today looks like it will beat even that!”
We continued up the trail to the lake. There, thousands of people formed a virtual human shield around water’s edge. Armed with cameras ranging from iPhones to pro-grade SLRs, they shot selfies, they shot loved ones and they shot their groups. No one appeared to be photographing the beauty of the setting.
A cacophony of human voices filled the air in a myriad of languages. English was occasionally one of them.
We attempted to escape the Disney-worthy crowd by taking the two-kilometre route to the far end of the lake, but the trail proved to be a walking version of a downtown freeway during rush hour.
Rather than return the way we came, we followed the horse route back. The trail was chewed up, muddy and reeked of horse puckies, but it was totally human free. It made us appreciate the smell of equines.
We stopped at the towering, Chateau Lake Louise hotel in the hopes of quaffing a brew with a view, but we were turned away.
“Sorry, but with the rainstorm due in 40 minutes, we’re limiting seating to hotel guests,” the hostess told us in a very pleasant voice.
Rain in 40 minutes? With at least an hour’s hike back to camp staring at us, we declined. We raced back down the Louise Creek Trail faster than my hiking buddy, Mick, heading for a trail’s end beer. If we’d met a bear on the trail, it would have needed to sprint to catch us.
Sixty-two minutes later, we reached our campsite safe and dry. It never did rain.
One characteristic of national parks, especially premier parks such as Banff, is that they draw visitors from all over the world. And that includes us. We’re visitors to Canada from that big foreign country to the south.
Banff’s international draw is reflected in our campground. A quick survey suggests that around one-third of all the RVs in the campground (this is the hard-sided campground where everybody is in a trailer or motorhome) are rentals. Seldom do we hear our fellow campers speaking in English, and while we see a few Quebec license plates, I don’t hear much French either.
Normally in campgrounds, we like to chat with our neighbors. But nobody does that here. It’s like a big, impersonal hotel where everyone keeps to themselves.
“These folks are not campers,” my lovely wife observes. “They’re simply parking here for the night in their mobile motels.”
I’d like to say it was painful to leave Lake Louise, but it wasn’t.
The campground was packed with RV renters who for the most part didn’t know the etiquette of camping. The family next to us apparently could only communicate by shouting, and the “do not wash dishes or laundry in washroom sinks” didn’t apply to many of our neighbors.
We did truly enjoy the beauty of the Canadian Rockies. One day we took the 200+ kilometre drive up the Icefields Parkway from Lake Louise to Jasper. Dark craggy mountains draped with hanging glaciers line both sides of the roadway, which provide enough photo fodder to satisfy a National Geographic shooter. Last time I came through here was in the winter when the roadway was as white as the hills. This time the pavement was black, the peaks gray and runoff-engorged waterfalls silvery white.
In Jasper, we visited the Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge where Dianne and I stayed a few years back on a winter ski visit and the deep gorge of Maligne Canyon where we took a winter hike. In the depths of winter, the stream is frozen and its walls lie draped with ice. Back then, the walk up felt like we were hiking up a rocky, glacial crevasse.
No canyon-bottom hikes this time. Raging with runoff, we looked down on a canyon roaring with water plunging over boulders and pouring down waterfalls.
The next day we drove down to Banff to do laundry, groceries and most importantly, stock up on beer and wine.
Located totally within the park, Banff has all the character of Aspen, Vail and Estes Park crammed into one packed town. The supermarket had fewer parking spaces than the average Starbucks and laundromats in this tourist-oriented town were few and far between.
But we succeeded in refilling the trailer pantry, restocking the trailer wine (and beer) cellar and reloading our trailer duffels with clean clothes. The Xterra gas tank is now topped up with fuel and we were ready to escape this incredibly beautiful but overcrowded tourist magnet.
From Lake Louise, we drove the freeway-like Trans-Canada highway past Banff, dropped out of the mountains, rounded Calgary and headed east into the Canadian prairie. The terrain gently rolled with undulating hills covered with green and yellow crops and dotted with small, blue water ponds. Sorry flatlanders, but we both agreed the landscape was far more attractive than crossing the Great Plains through Kansas or Nebraska.
Our destination is Dinosaur Provincial Park, a World Heritage site known for offering more dinosaur bones for its size than anywhere else in the world. We checked into a grassy campground shaded with leafy cottonwood trees with nearby pit toilets. Flush toilets, free showers and a burger-cooking restaurant were available a few hundred metres away.
While bones sparked the park’s creation, we came to explore and photograph the park’s badland topography. The landscape features a river and glacial-carved landscape covered in mounds of bentonite that’s been molded into an array of standing hoodoos and rilled peaklets. Cameras in hand, we hiked the park’s scenic loop drive, all five of the park’s interpretive trails and took a guided sunset drive into the park’s limited-admittance backcountry. We also swatted a myriad of mosquitoes.
Our stay overlapped Canada Day, which is like our 4th of July, but they do theirs four days earlier. July 1st marks the day 150 years ago when the British colonies came together to form what is now Canada. Falling on a Saturday, it was duly celebrated by a slew of families out camping with their kids and the family dog(s). I have to say that the interaction of the parents and children in this natural setting was a delight to watch.
The downside of having so many families sharing the campground was that the showers were always crowded and with the hot water supply frequently depleted. They may have been frigid, but at least they were free.
We are on a quest for the best poutine in Canada! Surprise, Surprise!
[Poutine, for those of you not in the know, is a Canadian creation that consists of French fries covered with cheese curds and smothered in gravy.]
Years ago, we had some awesome poutine at a restaurant in Jasper. We revisited it on this trip. The poutine was okay, but not like we remembered.
But now in Regina, Saskatchewan, we had great poutine at Leopold’s Tavern. Dianne had “Smoked Meat Poutine – the Best of Montreal and Quebec Combined in One” – with artery clogging bacon, Canadian bacon and fries smothered in beef gravy and white cheddar curds. MMMMMM!
I had “Jalapeno Poppers Poutine,” which was a spicy, south of two borders taste treat.
Both were pretty awesome, and neither of us could finish them all. The best poutine competition is going to be tough as we make our way across “The Great White North.”
We’re having a great time and seeing some incredible sights: Canadian Rockies, the badlands of Alberta and grasslands of Saskatchewan. Internet has been very sparse at the places we’ve stayed, but we have a bit better connection here in Regina for a few days.
