Lakes Azure and Vistas Pure
Nice Views, Beautiful Topography, and Scenic Drives
Alex accidentally sent our last trip update from his account for the Bloom Briefing (you can subscribe here!). Some people are on both lists, and we didn’t want to send it out twice. If you missed that post, which is about our hikes in the Canadian Rockies, you can read it here on the Grand Adventure website. Sorry about that! I’ve also heard from a few people that my post on Calgary went to their spam or promotions folder. If you’re thinking, “what post on Calgary?” I suggest you check one of those folders.
Onto this post, which is about all the beautiful sites we saw in Canada. I divided this into four geographic regions of the two parks.
Icefields Parkway
On our first day in the parks, we drove all the way from Calgary to our Airbnb just east of Jasper. The most scenic stretch of this drive was the Icefields Parkway, which runs from Lake Louise to the town of Jasper. We would traverse this parkway a few more times as we ventured out to do some hikes and drove back down to Lake Louise, where we stayed for two nights.
There are a few impressive lakes visible right along the road. One of these was Bow Lake, which is at one of the highest altitudes along the parkway and was still mostly frozen. Nearby was Waterfowl Lake, which was not still frozen and therefore provided some lovely reflections of the snowy mountains on its still surface.
On the subject of mountains, there were mountains everywhere. While some scenic viewpoints provided names of the mountains on small placards, we passed by dozens of beautiful mountains whose names will remain unknown.
A few rivers run alongside the parkway. The Athabasca, Bow, and Sunwapta are a few of the bigger ones. Most of these rivers originate from glaciers, making them a distinctive icy-blue-to-turquoise color.
These rivers also create several impressive waterfalls. We had to walk on short trails to Athabasca Falls and Sunwapta Falls, as Alex mentioned in the hiking post, but Tangle Falls and the Weeping Wall are visible directly from the parkway.
Athabasca River Valley
While visiting Jasper National Park, we didn’t stay in Jasper proper but rather in a small community called Folding Mountain just east of the park. We therefore drove into the park every day alongside the Athabasca River. While not in the high mountains, this area was very scenic and provided good animal spotting. We observed many elk, deer, bighorn sheep and even a bear alongside the river and near Jasper Lake and Talbot Lake.
Maligne Valley
We visited the Maligne Valley on two of our four days in Jasper. On the first day, we drove out to the two big lakes: Medicine Lake and Maligne Lake. It’s a drive of about 44 km off the main highway to Maligne Lake. I later learned while reading the Wikipedia page for Jasper National Park in the car that this road was originally constructed by “enemy aliens” interned in the park during World War I, mostly immigrants from Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. The road was upgraded during World War II by another round of interned Canadians, this time Japanese immigrants and Mennonite conscientious objectors to the war.
There was a huge swath of dead forest on the road leading up to Medicine Lake and along one long shore. It looked like a gigantic forest fire had swept through at some point in the last few years. You can see that dead forest on the edges of the lake in the two photos below. Medicine Lake was also notable for being the scene of our one on-foot bear encounter (more on that in Alex’s upcoming animals post!).
We continued down the highway to Maligne Lake, which is truly enormous. At over 7.6 square miles, it is one of the largest lakes in the Canadian Rockies. It was also, unfortunately, still very frozen and quite cold. And, largely to Alex’s chagrin, the Waffle Hut by the lake hadn’t yet opened for the summer season.
The Lakes of Banff National Park
We based ourselves for two days in Lake Louise, the posh tourist town originally created as an outpost for the Canadian Pacific Railway. (We even had one nice dinner out at a restaurant inside of the old station house building.) While neither Alex nor I particularly enjoyed the little hamlet of Lake Louise—it’s very clear that its sole existence is to serve tourists and the lakeshore was packed—the mountains are spectacular along this stretch of the parkway due to the high elevation.
We had picked our hotel largely based on proximity to the two lakes near the town of Lake Louise: the eponymous Lake Louise and Lake Moraine, another popular lake whose parking lot is known to fill up by sunrise. We figured we’d be close enough to Lake Louise that we could walk to it and close enough to the Lake Moraine access road to try to beat, or at least successfully join, the early morning rush.
As Alex mentioned in his post on hiking, we asked the hotel clerk about the crowds at Lake Moraine when we checked in. She told us that the road had only opened the week before—it closes in the winter due to snow—and that we might have some success checking the turnoff around 7 to 8 pm when people leave for the night. We decided to pick up some groceries and check the status of the turnoff on our way back. We had amazing luck; the park official reopened the lane just as we drove back!
Like a few other lakes, Lake Moraine was sadly still frozen. It also wasn’t totally full. It seemed like the snow that will fill it later in the season was still packed on some of the mountains. While the state of the lake was a little disappointing, I feel like it has the potential to be one of the most spectacular lakes throughout all of the Rockies. There’s something special about the chain of snow-streaked mountains reflecting onto the lake’s turquoise surface, even if half-frozen and half full.
Of course, we also ventured to Lake Louise itself. I was a little skeptical of its beauty before seeing it in person. I figure that a lake with so much hype as to birth a small town and come to representative Banff couldn’t be that special, since I rarely find things with that much hype live up to it.
Well, I was wrong. Lake Louise is a gorgeous, unreal shade of turquoise blue. I didn’t appreciate the color from the shore when we first arrived on a cloudy morning but as we hiked up a trail beside it and then came back down to a sunnier, only partly cloudy afternoon, I couldn’t help being impressed. Alex and I swear we didn’t edit the color of the lake in the photos below.
We ended our stay in Canmore, a small town just outside of Banff National Park. We drove down from Lake Louise as a huge rainstorm was rolling in and decided to loiter inside the park as much as possible, as the clouds hadn’t fully moved over to the parks side of the mountains yet.
We pulled off at a few lakes in the southern half of Banff. One of these was the Vermillion Lakes Drive, alongside a wetlands area that formed the original national park. Despite the cloudy day, the mountains reflected nicely along the lakes’ surfaces, and we glimpsed (and heard!) a few different waterfowl. We might have gone back to explore this area more the next day if it hadn’t rained all day.
We also stopped for a few minutes at Lake Minnewanka, one of the larger lakes in the Rockies as it’s dammed and also a reservoir. We weren’t that impressed by Lake Minnewanka until we continued driving along the road and crossed over a bridge built alongside the lake itself (possibly atop the dam, we aren’t sure). We couldn’t see to the end of it with the thick clouds that had gathered.
