)
Oh, that was perfect...from here it'd be just a straight drive down to Radium Hotsprings, and into Kootenay
National Park where we'd hopefully find a decent camping spot for the night.Here we go again with another vacation log, partly I'm finding this to be a great way to remember the details of a trip, having done up small journals on vacations in the past. And who knows, in the world of blogging that we exist in, maybe it's of interest. If you're not one for the wordy stuff, skip ahead to the shots, that's a-ok! I will separate this into 5 pages, one for each day. Links will be at the top and bottom of each page if you want to just skim.
Day 1 Next >>
Our Canadian Rockies Adventure began the morning of May 20th, a Friday before the May long weekend. We had initially planned on taking off the Friday and, in Kathy's case, the Saturday, then coming back on the Monday. However Kathy wound up having the Tuesday off as well, so a quick pleading of my case at work and suddenly we had a five day vacation before us. The only downside of our timing was somehow we'd both managed to pick up a bit of a cold a day or so before leaving. Mine was very minor and had mostly disappeared by Friday morning whereas Kathy's was just settling in. But troopers that we are, no cold would stop us unless we couldn't physically move.
In truth we were completely up in the air on where to go for this one, scheduling holidays is being a real challenge for us this year, so it wasn't until the Tuesday prior that we had decided on going into the Rockies, and it wasn't until Thursday night that we had tentatively planned where we'd start out.
Anyhow, we left the house around 8am, hit the bank for some campground fee cash and were off! Well, as fast as we could with the amount of coffee I'd ingested already. It's always a bit of a buzz kill when you're driving out of town on vacation and your sole objective is getting to your destination, but you've got to stop every half hour to go to the washroom. Cursed coffee...though we did get to see the gas station sights of many, many towns along the way.
Click here for a map of our journey
One of our stops included a national historic site, "The Last Spike" where the final iron spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway was hammered in, joining the east coast and west coast by rail. It was around here that Kathy noticed a rip developing in her jeans, so we'd be keeping an eye out for cheap clothing stores from here on in! Just before we got back into the car, an older East Indian man walked past and commented about love being in the air, how we should cherish each other and such. He just wanted to talk to someone I guess, his wife had just recently passed away, he had forgotten his wallet in Golden (about an hours drive from here) and his car was out of gas. We felt really bad for him, but there wasn't much we could do, I thought. Little did we know there was a gas station about 10 minutes up the road that we could have driven him to. Hopefully he's not still there...
Up until Golden is was all straight forward driving, taking 97 up to Sicamous
then onto the Trans Canada. But
in Golden we had to switch to Hwy 95 and while Mapquest is a wonderful tool, it
didn't really describe how we were
going to accomplish this. Filled up at the Shell and thought to ask the
attendant how to get to a clothing
store, he directed us into the town itself which really is just one main street.
As luck would have it, we
found a Saan, which had just gotten some jeans stock in, even if it was just
men's jeans. Found some that fit
Kathy pretty well and were a good price, then got back onto that one main road.
Luck was on our side as just
when I was thinking "how the heck do we get back on Hwy 1?", we found ourselves
already driving on Hwy 95 South.
Oh, that was perfect...from here it'd be just a straight drive down to Radium Hotsprings, and into Kootenay
National Park where we'd hopefully find a decent camping spot for the night.
I must say Hwy 95 is a nice drive. The landscape had been changing as we got to Golden and found ourselves with some higher mountains around, now those mountains were on all sides of us and we were following a wide river southeast. Farms lined the sides road, and the amount of large pickup trucks speeding past us was increasing by the minute, we must be approaching the Alberta border...we were also approaching some nasty weather. The forecast for the weekend was mainly rain in almost all the parks, though the more northerly ones had a marginally better long-term outlook (though the chance of snow was greater). Every 20 or 30 kilometers now we'd hit a patch of hard rain or hail, but we kept thinking "We've got rain gear, bring it on!" so it was ok! The picture at the left was in Glacier National Park before we hit Golden, at a pullout with no washroom, yet a trickling waterfall that made you wish for one.
Finally around 2 o'clock (technically 3 o'clock as we'd passed into the mountain time zone) we came upon Radium Hotsprings. The thing about National Parks is that you have to have a park pass to stop anywhere in them, and it's done either per person or per group but the starting price is $7 per person, per day. Right there, that's the price of a full campsite for the two of us in a Provincial park, and being that we were staying for 5 days we opted for the yearly group pass. $89 later, having justified this by saying we'd be back later in the year or early next year, we were off again, proudly displaying our "collectible park pass" from the rearview mirror.
The park was easier to find than the info center where we bought the pass, which had the worst signage, what seemed like a random guess on the distance and no indication of which side of the highway. Once you pass the "Entering Kootenay National Park" sign you drive through what seems to be a water carved canyon that is so narrow it overhangs the road a good deal, though it's high. Very dramatic and was a perfect initial view of the park, though I'd imagine rock fall there is a dangerous thing, especially if you had a convertible!
Then the rains came. Great buckets of water fell from the skies, the mountains disappeared from around us, the spray of semi's ahead of us took away the rest of the view and driving enjoyment, and all the while the pickup trucks got bigger, faster, and ruder. I've never been honked at for driving at 100 in a 90 zone, during a major downpour in an area prone to animal crossings. Thankfully the turnoff for the first campground came into view, such a relief. This was McLeod Meadows, which is technically the second campground from that direction in the park. The first one, called Redstreak, was $23 per night, had showers and was practically attached to a resort. Ugh...no thanks. As we entered McLeod Meadows we saw our first wildlife of the trip, three dear grazing on the side of the dirt road. Nice!
This campground had actually just opened that morning, thankfully for
us, so we expected very little in the
way of campers. What we did see was a lot of blow down, the forest here was more
fallen down than standing it
seemed. But the moss that carpeted everything here was great! It was still
raining, and so we toured around
all the available sites in the car. As it turns out, the campground backed onto
the Kootenay River, a fast
moving blue/green waterway, and all of the sites that had views of the river
were already taken. We chose one
that had an empty site on either side of us, a good amount of trees around to
setup our tarps, and seemed a
little secluded. The campsite number was G8.)
)
Setting up camp proved a bit of a challenge, we had ample tarps: one
mammoth one and one large one, however
getting them over the areas we wanted was hampered by the lack of trees in those
exact spots. The giant tarp we
decided to put over the tent (covering the entire tent pad) as this tent has
leaked on us before, 5 days in a
soggy tent don't make for a fun trip. And doing this took every last bit of
twine I'd bought...fortunately,
being the packrat I am, I had a good hundred feet of old twine in very small to
medium sized sections stuffed in
a bag from past camping trips! 20 or so knots later we had a few more good long
pieces to get that other tarp
up!
Another note about National Parks: not only do you pay through the nose to just get in, you then have to pay $17 per night for a site, and then $6 per night for a "fire permit". However...it's self registration here, and the firewood itself is in large piles free for your access. Long story short, we stiffed them the $6 fire permit each night. The rational behind that, besides feeling it was overpriced, is that the National Park websites all quoted $14/night for camping fees and made no mention of a fire permit or wood charge. They should be lucky they got what they did from us!
)
That night after settling in, taking a walk down to the river (and noticing
there was a trail to Dog Lake just
a few hundred yards from our site) we gorged ourselves on canned chili and rice,
which is the all-time best first
night food for camping trips. Not that beans should be consumed in such
quantities when you'll be sleeping in a
tent that night, for obvious reasons, but it's worth it. Got a fire going after
a couple failed attempts, we'd
forgotten to bring some good fire starter like lint or paper, so were reduced to
very wet needles. Eventually
we had a good one going though. That night we turned in around 10pm, however the
campsite two down from us had
been collecting more and more people as the evening went on, it was now up to 3
cars, 3 tents and 6 people.
Initially they didn't seem too bad, but suddenly when we went to sleep it turned
into a party zone, shouting,
stupid jokes, way into the night. Quiet time begins at 11 o'clock, that's the
"law" of the parks but seems it's not always followed. Earlier in the night we
had heard what sounded like gunshots as well, a little unnerving, but a ranger
(with a shotgun holstered in the cab of his truck) had come by to check up on
things and ask about that. He said he'd park somewhere close and hang out for a
while to see if anything develops, which was comforting. But the sounds
continued on into the wee hours from those in G6...I finally fell asleep around
1:30am or so. Kathy, thanks to her cold, was able to fall asleep a bit earlier.