We started the day by walking the Brook Loop trail. We admired the engineering for the train track completion in the early 1900s, when they made figure 8 loops for the trains to gradually ascend and descend making the gradient no more than the required 2.2%. The engineers were very ingenious and nothing would stand in their way to success, not even a very dangerous, avalanche-prone mountain pass.
As we continued East across The Rockies we knew we’d see a lot more trains and feats of engineering.
It is strange that if you say to someone in the UK that you are going to cross The Canadian Rockies everyone assumes you will do it via the Rocky Mountaineer Train, as if there is no other way. So it initially came as a surprise to us that the Trans-Canadian Highway (road) follows along the same route – without some of the tunnels of course. So off we set towards Lake Louise. To start with we found ourselves saying things like “it’s just like driving in The Alps really” and “it’s not as spectacular as I thought” but then as we continued the oohs and ahhs became more frequent and comments became “wow, it’s just so vast”, “I can’t take photographs as I can’t fit it all in” and “wow, look at that huge cut in the mountain that we are about to go through”.
We stopped in the town of Golden for lunch and admired the ski runs above us from Kicking Horse Mountain Resort and then crossed into the Yoho National Park. The mountain peaks became bigger, closer and more frequent.
We took a side road to see the Takakkaw Falls (the second highest falls in Canada).
The water hitting each step was mesmerising and the river milky with all the rock flour.
We suddenly found ourselves in tourist craziness once more with tour buses everywhere, rented RVs galore and Asians driving rented cars very badly. We stopped at The Spiral Tunnels and were lucky enough to see trains go through (and out again as the trains were so long) both the upper and lower spirals. On the lower spiral that makes the train about 3km long!!!!!
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Who thought “Let’s dig a loop right around inside the mountain in order to make the gradient more gradual and then when the train is going the wrong way, we’ll dig another loop in that other mountain over there”?. What an incredible feat of engineering!!!!!
Then we drove through the Kicking Horse Pass and back into Alberta (goodbye one hour of sleep) to the town of Lake Louise. Wow, it was busy there. We were told at Tourist Info that if we wanted to drive to Lake Louise or Moraine Lake we’d need to be there by 5.30am to get a parking space. And all the campsites were full but we could stay in an overflow carpark off the highway for the night. We turned up to find at least 40 other RVs parked up for the night ! Wow!!!! Our lovely neighbours from Kamloops did give us some lovely homegrown tomatoes and cucumbers.
The weather forecast was for rain for a few days (maybe snow on the mountains) so we decided to head to Banff for a few days and then return here, hopefully with some sunshine.
