Banff

Lake Johnson

September 22, 2024

In the morning, we checked out a few of the lakes in the Kananaskis national park.  Although the park is pretty, it wasn’t anything like we had seen in Banff. A friend and ex-coworker of mine (Sheryl) showed me a beautiful picture of Lake Johnson, I had to go back and see the lake when it wasn’t raining.   We stopped for lunch in Canmore and I was really surprised at how good the shawarma and biryani was due to Canmore being a mountain resort town.

We got to Lake Johnson.  Although my picture is not nearly as good as Sheryl’s, I am glad that we went back.   We hiked all the way around the lake.   It was a pretty nice hike with great views from the the other sides.

September 20, 2024

When planned this trip, I wanted to book a tour in Banff. Unfortunately, there weren’t any tours that would pick us up in Kananaskis.  While looking at things to do in the area, I noticed an advertisement for a tour app.   I had my doubts but the night before, I decided to check it out.  I downloaded the app and paid $5.95 for the Banff tour.

I went in with low expectations, would it know if I took a wrong turn, could we leave the tour and come back to it?   Would the tour be in synch with my actual location or would the guide be describing something that I hadn’t seen yet?  Overall, I was very pleased with the Guide Along tour from https://guidealong.com/tour/banff-townsite-tour/.   Once we got to the designated area, it started giving us turn by turn instructions on where to go, where to park and what we were seeing.

Without stops, the tour was about 3 and 1/2 hours without stops, with stops, it took the better part of the day.  Needless to say, I was please with the app and the tour.  As we were going to through the various stops, I thought about how an organized tour has a set schedule, we were able to spend the amount of time that we wanted to spend at each stop.

Banff is a place that everyone should visit.  It has beautiful lakes and amazing wildlife. We stopped in town and got breakfast.  We noticed that most of the gift shops were selling Banff coffee mugs along with Thai Lodi pants.   I noticed that the Banff Mug was identical to the mug we bought in Catalina Island except that it said Catalina Island instead of Banff.  Thai Lodi pants are sold in touristy areas of Thailand for a few dollars – they thin and light, what you want to wear when you are visiting the tropics, but Canada?   It wasn’t just one store, we noticed Thai Lodi pants and most of the gift shops and all I could think

After breakfast, we headed out to start our tour.   It started to rain (and sleet) so we decided to go back and repeat the tour when the weather was a little better.   There was a very special moment where we drove out along the golf course.  We were on a one way single lane road when we spotted a huge elk.  He hid in the tress and we backed the car up and then turned it off, sure enough, he emerged and then crossed the road in front of us.  His antlers from one side to the other must have been 6 feet.  It was amazing to see.

On our tour, we learned that “River of No Return” was filmed there.  Marylin Monroe insisted on doing her own stunts and ended up breaking her leg as she went over Wapta falls.

A Hoodoo

Downtown Banff

Wapta Falls