Thursday July 30th
We packed up and left the Y and Banff, driving out of town on the old highway, overlooked by the incredible craggy heights of Castle Mountain and with interesting infoboards about the planned forest burn of 1993 which served to regenerate the forest and ensure growth of different ages in the face of over-effective modern fire protection.
We carried on past the over-popular Lake Louise and onto the sinuous Moraine Lake road. The roadsides were a blaze of wildflowers and at the lake the parking lot was full of visitors but once we started out on the Consolation Lake trail things soon improved. This trail was not for the faint-hearted: a sign at the trailhead informs you that you’re only allowed to walk in compact groups of four or more in the berry season when passing grizzlies head onto the trail to snaffle up to 250,000 berries a day. And the berry season is of course just now! A Dutch couple tagged along with us for safety and together we spotted various piles of bear dung and some heavily scratched treebark. The trail crossed a huge glacial moraine and then wound along through woodland alongside Babel Creek until it suddenly emerged at Consolation Lake: greenish blue water ringed by a rocky shoreline and surrounded on all sides by steep scree-covered sloped rising to mountains above. A better place for a picnic would be hard to find and striped ground squirrels were on hand to hoover up any crumbs we left behind. The girls had a great time scrambling on the rocks (amazingly Maya did not fall in!) and ended up drawing in the sun while Angus and I just sat and drank in the scenery.
We returned to the main tourist sight, Moraine Lake itself. The colour is simply amazing: think of one of those 1960s postcards of the Riviera and remember the intense touched-up turquoise of the water? Well Moraine Lake is that colour but without the interference of Photoshop. Incredible.
We drove back to Lake Louise to have ice cream and snap up a few must-have items (including a little late in the day a bear bell to attach to the rucksack to ward off future oursine encounters) and then set off on the 150km journey back up the Icefield Parkway – or so we thought. A major traffic accident had taken place and the road was closed. If this happened in Britain you’d forget the motorway and switch to the A-road, or at worst take an annoying detour, but the Icefields Parkway is quite simply the only road running north through the Canadian Rockies. If it closes you wait. And of course a road accident 60km from a smallish town and 100km from the nearest hospital and emergency services takes some time to deal with. At one stage we were told the road could be closed for anything up to 8 hours. After 4 hours and increasing drizzle, the delights of the carpark at Lake Louise were starting to pall, but in the end we heard that the road was open to alternating traffic so we set off. Fortunately for us, there was far less traffic moving south-north than the other way round and we only had a 10 minute wait at the single lane stretch.
We missed the views and as the drizzle continued and darkness fell it was a little scary driving along waiting for an elk to run out in front of the car, but we eventually made it to our motel in Sunwapta a little after 11and all had a great night’s sleep.
