Celebrating 10 Years in Banff

We’ve been married for 10 years! That’s 87,600 hours!

To celebrate, we planned a trip to Banff to see beautiful scenery, hike at non-toddler paces, and eat delicious food. My parents watched Margo at our house, so we were completely schedule-free and at our own whims (thank you mom and dad!).

We flew from Denver to Calgary and spent an afternoon wandering around town, seeing the tail-end of the pride celebration crowds heading home, followed by a really wonderful dinner on the patio at the River Café. The next morning, we picked up a camper van and drove to Banff for 4 days. We did a steep steep hike on day one, getting our first glimpses of the massive rocky mountain views and glacier-blue lakes. We checked out Banff town and found the perfect orientation for the camper van in our campsite.

We took it a bit easier on day two with a day of NZ-style driving where we pokey-puppied our way up the Icefields Parkway and stopped for short hikes and lunch by a lake. We managed to end the day with a visit to Moraine Lake (only accessible by shuttle) and a fast-paced hike to nearby Consolation Lakes to make sure we made it back to the last shuttle down to the valley.

The next morning we were back on a shuttle early to get to Lake Louise, which was great to see before the crowds set in. We hiked up from there to Lake Agnes, skipped the teahouse because of the long line, and kept hiking to the Plain of Six Glaciers. We stopped at the teahouse there for lunch, continued up to the glacier viewpoint, then hiked back down to Lake Louise for a scenic drink. There had a bit of wildfire smoke on previous days and that morning, but the afternoon that day was much worse, and you can see it get pretty thick in our photos. We were really grateful that it was only that bad for a few hours, not for our whole trip!

Our fourth day was more relaxed again, with a walk around Banff town, along the river, and through a garden. We had a picnic by a park and then drove back to Calgary to return our camper van and end the trip with an incredible sushi dinner.

Commentary that’s too long to fit in the photo captions:

• Camper vanning was great! Our van was really well designed, and we’d definitely do another trip. The downside was that when we left for the day, it didn’t look like anyone was using our campsite. One day we didn’t get back to camp until 9:30pm (exhausted), and we found that someone else was in our spot! They had a van, too, and it was completely dark. We drove to the registration office, which was luckily still open, and they sent someone to knock on the van. Turns out the folks just didn’t read the site number correctly. 🤦‍♀️ 30+ minutes later, we got a new site for that night and navigated our van into a relatively flat position in the dark.
• Banff had MANY MANY very serious warnings about bears. Including a sign on the Consolation Lakes hike about traveling in tight packs of four. Luckily that was only recommended, not mandatory while we were there. But despite all these warnings, we saw no bears, and hardly any wildlife, which was a big contrast to our Tetons trip earlier in the summer. On this trip, we only saw elk in town, a few deer, mountain goats far enough away that they were white dots, and marmots. The marmots were the highlight because it was a mama and baby!
• The hike on our first day was so steep for the last 3/4 mile that it was challenging to get up. It was a sandy dirt surface, so very slide-y, and I was a bit concerned about getting back down. I was pretty sure I would slide and fall several times. Luckily with some very creative footwork and strategic use of shrubbery, we slowly made our way out of the steepest section. When we had almost made it down the steep slide-y section, we encountered a family with a toddler and young kid hiking up, wondering how much further it was. We advised them not to continue. 😬