First Two Weeks In Canada
After loving the beautiful mountain scenery of Glacier National Park last summer, we were excited to visit the Canadian Rockies this year. Months before I had somehow managed to get 8 weeks of reservations in various campgrounds in 4 Canadian National Parks. It’s a chaotic lottery system, with up to 50K people on the website trying to make reservations for the entire season at the same time, so we felt very lucky with what we got.
Our luck ran out in Montana when we noticed a heavily worn trailer tire and had to limp across the border on our spare. Besides that problem, the actual border crossing was a breeze. I’d read about RVs getting searched down to their underwear drawers, but we got through with just a couple of questions.
Our first stop was Waterton Lakes National Park, the Canadian portion of the Glacier-Wateron International Peace Park. We stayed in a full hookup site at the Townsite Campground. We loved that we could walk to the small town, the lake, and trailheads from the campsite.
Waterton had a catastrophic wildfire fire in 2017. Firefighters succeeded in saving the historic Prince of Wales park lodge and town but there are burn scars all over the mountainsides.
The best thing to do in Waterton is to spend time on the lake. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any workweek afternoons with calm enough weather to kayak so we did a couple of hikes instead.
The short and steep Bear’s Head trail has a fantastic view of the area.
We also did the Bertha Lake Trail through a lot of blooming fireweed. We came across fresh bear scat on the trail near Bertha Lake, which was a first for us!
Sadly, we had to cut our week in Waterton, as well as our next planned National Park stay, short. We needed to get a replacement tire and attempt to remedy the cause of the uneven wear and these things just can’t happen in the small mountain towns. Waterton didn’t even have diesel. We left on Friday afternoon to make a week-long detour to the larger town of Lethbridge.
I don’t have many photos to show of our week in Lethbridge. The weekend was smoky and we took care of our errands. We did have a very nice overflow spot at Elba Farms RV Park.
Elba Farms is a small family-run hay farm that also has animals, so was a unique place to stay. Even though Alberta is known for the famous mountain towns of Banff and Jasper, most of southern Alberta is farmland.
The following Friday afternoon we got back on our schedule and moved to Kootenay National Park. Kootenay is just west of Banff National Park in British Columbia. The continental divide separates the two provinces as well as the two National Parks.
We stayed in a full hookup site at the Redstreak Campground.
We made the most of our Saturday in Kootenay and started with the popular Stanley Glacier Trail. The official maintained trail stopped in the valley shown in the photo below, but we continued up the scree (loose rock) and across the waterfall to get a closer view of the glacier.
Next, we did a shorter hike through Marble Canyon.
And another short hike to see the Paint Pots, which weren’t that exciting after just visiting Yellowstone. But, we did stop to soak our feet in the frigid glacier-fed Vermillion River on the way back.
Happy to have our detour behind us, the next day we moved to a campground on the Icefields Parkway, which is the road that connects Banff and Jasper National Parks.
