Canada National Parks. Elisa and Melinda went with another sister, Teri, to explore some of Canada's national parks. All of the national parks of Canada are free in 2017, which made it even better. We went to Banff, Jasper, Waterton, and Yoho National Parks. We had planned on going to a few more but fires in the area created a lot of smoke which obscured our view. And since the point of some of the parks was the view and we didn't want to get burned up, we went with Plan B.
You can see the smoke at Waterton (right). It still made for good pictures but the smoke did impact the view on other days. After Waterton, we spent three days in Banff. We went to Jasper and hiked Maligne Canyon on one day. In Maligne Canyon, we had read a blog where they recommended we start at the 6th bridge and hike up to the first bridge. In our opinion, we could have started at the 5th bridge and seen all of the coolest parts of the canyon. We hiked to the 4th bridge and covered about 5 miles total. We decided against the Jasper Skytram because of the smoke and clouds and, instead, stopped at several overlooks on our way back to Banff. On our second day, we hiked to the Plain of Six Glaciers Teahouse at Lake Louise and then went up to the overlook for Lake Moraine. The clouds lifted while we were at the teahouse which was awesome! The hike was a little more than 7 miles roundtrip. Our last day, we hiked Johnston Canyon and got to see all of the awesome waterfalls there. That hike is about 4 miles altogether. We drove through Yoho and saw an awesome waterfall. It was a great trip. |
It is hard to decide what pictures to put up. The most amazing thing is the color of the water. Lake Moraine (at the top) has the bluest water. It really looks like someone added food coloring to the water. It is amazing. Besides the fires, the only negative were the number of people everywhere. It was very, very, very crowded.