This post is part of ‘The Big Loop’ series, which chronicles our summer road trip from Ontario out to the West Coast of Canada and back via the northern US states.

In this instalment, we spend a week in the Rockies getting up close and personal with the mountains starting from Banff and up the Icefields Parkway to Jasper.

‘We’ this time is five of us, including Michelle’s brother, sister-in-law and nephew.

A Week in the Rockies: Setting the Scene

Sometimes when you’re travelling, you’ve immersed yourself so deeply in all the places you’re going to visit and the routes you’re going to take, that you forget that not everyone knows all these places like the back of your hand. So we thought a map might come in handy for those of you following along at home. 

First, the big picture. The red box is the part of Canada that we’re going to be spending the next few weeks exploring – the southwest corner of Alberta and the southern third(ish) of British Columbia:

Drilling down a little, we’ll be using Canmore, Alberta (just west of Calgary) as our base, and spending a lot of time going up and down the TransCanada Highway and the Icefields Parkway between Canmore and Jasper. We’re going to get to know this piece of highway very, very well over the next week or so:

Cue Clown Car Music

You’d think with roof racks and a box, fitting five people into our SUV wouldn’t be that big a deal. But it’s a tighter squeeze than Al getting the last of the ketchup onto a toasted cheese sandwich. We cram the rooftop box full of all the random loose stuff we normally have in the back of the car, along with the golf clubs, tennis rackets, disc golf discs, pickleball rackets, and various shoes. Then we take two suitcases and strap them next to the box, and finally jigsaw the remaining suitcases and other random stuff leftover into the back of the car. And repeat each time we move to a new location.

Banff-Adjacent

When we were planning this trip, we knew we were at a distinct disadvantage when it came to finding places to stay. With no kids, we weren’t in a position to give up our firstborn child to pay for some of these hotels in high season. So we were always on the lookout for cheaper alternatives. Starting with Banff – which is both insanely popular, and insanely expensive. So we opted to base ourselves about 30 minutes east, in the town of Canmore which is much more our speed and much more chilled out. We found a very pleasant ‘rustic’ three-bedroom cabin at the Rundle Chalet. The other big draw here was that we could park our car here for the week prior to our arrival, while we took the train.
From here we plan on doing day trips in and around the Banff area.

A Week in the Rockies – Day 1 in Banff: Water, Water Everywhere

“Look at all the water,” Michelle’s brother Dene shakes his head and says yet again with a sense of awe. As someone who grew up in the parched land of West Australia where fresh water is like gold dust, seeing the sheer abundance in Canada is mind blowing.
On this occasion it is the horizonal Bow Falls that in summer pumps through 76,000 litres every second. Yep, that’s not a typo, it’s a LOT of fresh water. And this is just one of the many, many rivers in the area. Hence the Aussie’s awe-struck reaction.

Bow River starts just a hundred km away, at the Bow Glacier, and flows through the town of Banff for 600km — on through Alberta and Saskatchewan, where it joins up with the Saskatchewan River (where we last saw it almost two weeks ago on our visit to The Paris of the Prairies) and goes all the way to Hudson’s Bay. The sheer number of animals, farming, hydroelectric and recreation that depend on this water is staggering. Especially when you consider its source is a glacier that is melting and receding. Rapidly. What will happen when the glacier is no longer able to sustain the river?

Our first day starts with a wander through the town of Banff (need coffee need coffee ooh good coffee at Good Earth Café) and then along the shores of Bow River.

We end with the requisite visit to the regal-looking Banff Springs Hotel, one of Canada’s ‘grand railway hotels’ built in the heyday of rail and the British Empire. Every Canadian city worth its salt has one of these magnificent hotels, and Banff Springs likes to think it’s the most beautiful (though the Chateau Frontenac might have something to say about that).

We aren’t staying here (see lack of firstborn, above), but for the price of a small car we settle for a drink. Then we head back to Canmore for dinner at the Where the Buffalo Roam Saloon (love a good saloon) and then cards at home.

A Week in the Rockies: Day 2 at Lake Louise and Moraine Lake

Remember we said Banff is popular? Well, Lake Louise is in-SANE in the height of summer. 25 years ago we just drove past and stopped in. Not anymore. Wanna park at the lake? You’ll need to get there well before 8am, and if you miss out on a spot in the relatively small parking lot, well… we weren’t really sure what happens then. (Not to mention you’ll be paying more than $20 for the day, as well as needing a Parks Canada pass). You could spend hours doing laps of the parking lot waiting for a spot.

So we decide rather than chance it, we’ll book the Lake Louise shuttle instead. Which is not exactly a stress-free activity either. Tickets open up for the shuttle 48 hours before, so at 8am 2 days prior, three of us are on various devices, all madly hitting the website to try and grab 5 seats. We manage to get them, but by 8:15 all the seats are gone!

With precious tickets in hand, we set off before dawn to drive the 90 minutes from Canmore up to the Lake Louise ski resort and jump on the shuttle bus. 20 minutes later we’re at the lake. We start with coffee at the Fairmont along with a few hundred of our closest friends, and then walk along the edge of the emerald shores of Lake Louise. This is one of the most iconic spots in Canada, so we make sure we get a couple of photos.

From here, we follow the Beehive Trail 3.5km through the forest up past Mirror Lake and eventually reach the Lake Agnes (named after the women we mentioned in our previous post, Agnes MacDonald who rode the cowcatcher at the front of the train from Banff to the Coast). Lake Agnes sits 400m above Lake Louise and is the centre point of a stunning cirque created by three mountain peaks.

Lake Agnes is also the site of a tea house that has been here for over 100 years. Despite getting here early, there’s a long queue so we perch on a rock and eat our bagged lunch instead.

Back at Lake Louise there’s a handy 30-minute shuttle to Moraine Lake with a very chatty driver. From here we have a choice of two short trails: the high road or the low road. The low road follows the shoreline around the lake and is Lukas’ choice (possibly to have some parent-free time to himself). We figure we’ll get a better view by taking the high road, so that’s what we do. And we’re rewarded with some absolutely stunning views of the bright azure water of the glacier lake. The blue is caused by minerals that have been ground to dust by the glacier and are suspended in the water. There’s still quite a bit of smoke haze happening from the huge forest fires raging in BC, but we get some nice photos anyhow.

Back in Canmore our day in the mountains ends with a great dinner at the Grizzly Paw Pub and then home to play some Shut the Box – which was fun – and Horse Race – which was ridiculously, leave-your-body fun.

When Lukas described Horse Race we thought, meh, okay, we’ll humour him. The premise is simple. Take a standard deck of cards. Take out the aces and place them side by side across the bottom of the table. These are the ‘horses’. Up the side of the table, place seven cards face down. These are the ‘track’. The four players each choose a horse. The fifth person is the ‘announcer’. Their two jobs are a) deal the cards and b) narrate the race. They shuffle the deck and then flip over the top card. Only the suit matters – the Ace of that suit moves forward on the track one card length. They keep flipping over cards (and narrating the race) until one of the Aces makes it to the end of the track. Lukas starts as the narrator.

What do the rest of us do? Unexpectedly to all of us, as soon as the first card is flipped we all start SCREAMING for our horses to WIN the race. We’re shouting and yelling and cajoling and after a few minutes are literally HELPLESS with laughter. To this day I have no idea why this game was so much fun.

I guess it could’ve been the gin.

A Week in the Rockies – Day Three: Floating on Air at Emerald Lake, Yoho NP

It’s the strangest feeling, you know it’s water but it feels like floating on air. When you stick the paddle in it’s like there’s nothing there. It’s a little like the sense-bending experience of a James Turrell exhibit where you have no concept of the borders of the room around you (James Turrell is a cool ’light artist’ who has huge installations in places as diverse as Japan, the US and Argentina.)

We’re canoeing on Emerald Lake in Yoho National Park about an hour and a half north of Banff. The last few days the skies have been covered in a heavy haze of smoke from the huge forest fires raging across BC. But today luck is on our side. We stop in at the lakeside hotel bar for lunch while it pours with rain, then emerge to a beautiful summer afternoon of clear sunny skies. We’ve come here to canoe on the lake and the experience doesn’t disappoint.

Our two classic red Canadian canoes slip quietly through the water. We stalk a loon on the water for awhile, who seems unconcerned with the attention. We’ve done a lot of canoeing in Canada which has been awesome, but this is like nothing we’ve experienced before. As spectacular as the photos we take are, it was even more amazing IRL.

On the way here on our day trip from Canmore we stop at Natural Bridge, which is… well, a natural bridge of stone across an impressive waterfall. It looks like you used to be able to walk across it, but these days you have to satisfy yourself with a selfie.

We also stop at the highway viewpoint for the Spiral Tunnels, from our Rocky Mountaineer trip a few days ago. You have to be pretty lucky to see a train entering or leaving the tunnels, and we hang out here for half an hour with no luck. They need an app or something to tell you when trains are coming… hmmm…

After another stunning day we head back for our last night in Canmore. For dinner we try the Iron Goat, owned by a friend of a friend, and while sitting outside have a lovely meal and an ongoing battle with a large… dunno… small marmot? Huge squirrel? Anyway he was well-known to the waitress, who shooed him off only for him to return a minute or two later. And with views of the Three Sisters mountains from the patio, who wouldn’t want to hang out?

A Week in the Rockies – Day 4: Icefields

It’s hard to pull Dene away from the edge of the lake, but after almost an hour staring at the mirrored reflection we really need to pull our jaws off the floor and get going. Bow Lake, source of the aforementioned Bow Falls in Banff, is just one of the magical sights along the Icefields Parkway which we’re driving today along the spine of the Rockies on our way from Canmore to Jasper.

Knowing it would be a drive with lots of stops, we left early this morning. It’s a perfect summer’s day and with mountains looming over us on both sides of the highway everywhere we look seems like a postcard. It’s hard to choose where to stop. Like Crowfoot Glacier, for example, where the huge block of ice sits atop the mountain like a snow cone. If our cameras needed actual film, we’d have run out of space in the car long ago.

The highlight of the drive (one of the highlights??) is the Athabasca glacier, one of the many glaciers that form the massive Colombia Icefield. Even though it’s the most visited glacier in North America, its massive scale means it never really feels crowded. And it’s not until you start walking up the gravelly hill to reach the edge of the ice that you truly appreciate this scale.

Unlike the Perito Merino glacier we visited in Argentina, the Athabasca glacier is receding, and receding pretty rapidly. There are signs posted along the hike showing where the edge of the glacier used to be at various points over the years, and it’s pretty sobering. If you’re thinking about visiting, I’d suggest you don’t wait too long, as it’s retreating rapidly.

Wildlife Bingo

After all the photo stops along the Icefields Parkway it’s early evening by the time we pull into Whistlers Campground on the outskirts of Jasper. But we’re a long way north now and there’s still plenty of sunlight left and a beautiful, long Canadian dusk awaits.

We’d already been warned that the campground was in ‘regeneration mode’, so we were prepared for the almost complete lack of mature trees across most of the space, but it’s still a little confronting. Many of the pine trees in the area have been killed by the invasive and voracious pine beetle, which is an increasing problem across the country as our summers get hotter and our winters milder.

Luckily, the wildlife more than make up for the lack of trees. For the entire drive up the Parkway we’ve been keeping our eyes peeled for the elk, moose and bears we’ve promised the Marfs. Sadly, we’ve spotted a sum total of zero so far. But as we pull into the campground we see our first elk, and see many more just wandering through the campground while we’re there, including one who seemed pretty interested in what was inside one of the buildings. Our classic Canadian animal spotting has commenced.

The Marfleets are in a big canvas-walled ‘tent’ / building known as an oTENTik. (This is a clever play on how a French person would say authentic). While the oTENTik doesn’t have power, it does have an electric heater, which Michelle and Al are coveting, as the temperature is due to drop into the single digits overnight. But we make a cheery fire and make smores, reveling in the Canadian-ness of it all.
It’s quite remarkable the difference between here and Banff as far as the number of tourists and level of hecticity hectic-ness activity. Jasper is a pretty chilled out spot to spend a few days.

A Week in the Rockies Days 5-7: Wicked Waterways

The water gushes down rock faces, through holes in the rock and forms whirlpools as it winds its way through the narrow walls of the limestone gorge. The Maligne Canyon is just a small part of 16km of an underground waterway linking two large lakes. It’s a ‘Karst system’ of underground caves, canyons, sinkholes and springs. A cavers paradise.

We’d been here yesterday but a thunderstorm meant we’d retreated inside for a delicious lunch and some excellent Canadian craft beers. But while the weather was against us, the wildlife continued to deliver. Driving from the canyon to Maligne Lake we saw the telltale signs of an animal spotting: lots of cars pulled over by the side of the road, and lots of cameras sticking out of windows. Sure enough, in the clearing we spot a huge moose with majestic antlers.

It’s quite amazing to think that these massive beasts regrow new sets of these antlers every year – in the fall they, well, fall off.

Our destination yesterday had been the source of the water in the canyon. At 22km long, Maligne Lake is the largest, naturally formed glacier-fed lake in the Canadian Rockies. Known to local First Nations people as Beaver Lake (no beavers spotted the day we visited), French explorers decided ‘wicked’ was a better description, possibly due to the dangerous nature of the rapids that form as the water leaves the lake and feeds into the Maligne River.

Over our three days in Jasper we’ve managed two of the classic Canadian animal sightings promised in the brochures. Dene is still very keen to see a bear, Lukas is not so sure.

And now it’s time to bid Lukas farewell. After a couple of weeks of hanging with the oldies, he’s flying to New York City for a holiday from the holiday. So we drive for the last time back down into Banff and drop him off at the bus station before turning around and heading west, towards Vancouver. Next stop: Revelstoke.

A Week in the Rockies In A Nutshell: 

This part of the world is incredible, and incredibly popular. Here are a few tips to make your dollar go a little further, and make your days go a little easier.

• Staying in Banff is very expensive at any time of the year – there isn’t really an ‘off-season’ here. Consider staying in Canmore, which is… less expensive. But it does mean a lot of driving back and forth between Canmore and Banff, Canmore and Lake Louise, Canmore and Yoho… Staying in Lake Louise might be a better option if you can afford it.

• Visiting Lake Louise in the summer, don’t bother trying to park at the base of the lake. Take the Lake Louise shuttle. You can book tickets 48 hours in advance at the Parks Canada Reservation system. You will need to create a username/password in order to buy the tickets. Tickets open up for the shuttle 48 hours in advance, and they go extremely quickly. If you have multiple people with multiple devices, get all of you logged in and trying to book tickets when the site opens at 8am. Click on the ‘Day Use’ tab and choose the ‘Shuttle to Lake Louise and Moraine Lake’ option.

• Don’t count on getting a meal at Lake Agnes Tea House in the summer, or at least not without a lengthy wait. (Even when you get one of the first shuttles of the day). We’d suggest bringing your own lunch which you can enjoy on one of the benches around the edge of the lake. Or, make a bee-line from the bus and do your best speed-hiking impression. (Also, go to the bathroom before you leave Lake Louise!)

• Canoeing on Emerald Lake is expensive and you do need to wait in line, but we found it 100% worth the time and money. We’ve done a lot of canoeing in Canada and this was like nothing else.

• An invaluable resource for a trip in this area is the bloggers Cameron and Natasha of The Banff Blog. Without their up-to-date info we would have no doubt been circling the Lake Louise parking lot for days.