Camping Canadian Rockies & Changing Plans

Hi everybody. So we are on the road again. Kind of doing a, I'm gonna call it an Alberta rebound because we're heading back that way but different places. Yeah we're actually further north now. We're going to take the Trans-Canada Highway 1. Our destination kind of for this trip is Kootenay National Park. We do have reservations this trip. We've booked for all the nights and we're going for about 10 days. Well we'll see where we end up because the weather will kind of drive us. We're already talking about going up somewhere a little higher so we can cool down. In the interim our first night Lac Lejeune. You've seen us here on some previous videos but look it looks so pretty. So we hope you enjoy the rest of the trip with us. very nice evening. It was warm but it cooled down to about 11 degrees by five or so this morning. So very pleasant. Today we're supposed to be going to Revelstoke. Our big issue is just trying to keep our van reasonably cool for Finch. It wouldn't be so much of a problem if we weren't traveling with a pet. Revelstoke's supposed to be quite warm so we'll see. We can always run our air conditioner off our batteries for a couple hours. That helps cool the van down substantively. We're probably trying to arrive later in the day. That's another option. We're eventually going to be in Kootenay National Park. Spending a little bit of time in Jasper as well. But we've narrowed down a couple other campgrounds that we've been to before that range in elevation from maybe, I don't know, 5,500 feet to 6,600 feet. So those are backups for us and they're all first come first serve options so that could work out quite well. In Revelstoke it was 37 degrees. It's just too hot and I don't think Martha Creek campground would be any different. It's just about 20 kilometers off the road from Revelstoke. So we're going to try Glacier National Park, the Illa Silhouette campground and see if there's anything there. It might be really busy because Revelstoke is very busy. Gordon said everything was... Yeah, there were lineups, gas station lineups, restaurant lineups. It was just, I mean, what do you expect? It's a Sunday in the summer. It's still very, very busy. This is our campsite at the Illa Silhouette campground in Glacier National Park. It's 27 right now. It was 28. Beautiful. You can probably hear the creek or river running sort of behind us, in front of us technically, behind me. Finch loves to get brushed by Gordon. There was a time when he wouldn't let us touch him at all with the brush. So this is progress. First morning here at Glacier. We're only here for one day actually. We just came in to avoid the heat. Still it was 28 degrees here yesterday. Did get down to nine at night which was nice. And I'm just out for a morning walk. I was going to do a hike but there's bear sightings in the area, grizzly intercubs and I just didn't want to risk and I came across them. So as I was starting my walk a couple of young guys scooted up the same trail. So I let them get a little farther ahead so I'm comfortable going up here for a ways given the fact there's a couple folks ahead of me. And I've got my air horn of course and my bear spray. So a little bit farther trip than I expected but not a full hike today. Off to the right meeting of the waters. That's the trail we were on last night. You can actually do it as a loop. This is a way to Sir Donald and Pearly Rock. I really enjoyed the Pearly Rock trip that I did before. It's steep but amazing views. Wonderful. Hey bear. Just me. Came up to share your wonderful viewpoint. Oh beautiful. Sun's just coming up into the valley. So how's this for a viewpoint? That's beautiful. That route up there is if you do the, I think it's the Glacier Trail. Looking more east. This way. Beautiful. Waterfall there. Just slightly off to the left. You see sort of a rounded bump. I believe that's Pearly Rock. And there's a little snow field you have to scamper through. I was thinking if we did it again this year, which we hadn't planned to be here. I definitely want my micro spikes. And then down over here more to the left. I think that's cutest boy. Oh kiss kiss. Amazing view from this campsite but unfortunately you're also very close to the highway. Beautiful though. And you get the sun in all day. The fire ban is in effect now in BC. Our first morning here at Kootenay National Park. I'm gonna head out for a bit of a hike. The challenge is the hike I want to do is the Stanley Glacier. It's maybe eight, eight and a half kilometers to turn. Plus it's gonna take me three kilometers of walking up the highway to get there and then back. This is probably the most dangerous part of the hike. Crossing the darn highway. Nice wide shoulders though unfortunately. We camped kind of at the base of that mountain a little closer to the highway. It's mostly empty except for this wonderful truck. The trail's right over here. It's starting to warm up. I walked a little farther up the road just so I could get a picture of the glacier from up on the highway. The trail starts here. The trail's well used. Gentleman that had the truck from Back to the Future. Okay I know it's not DeLorean but he's just ahead of me a little way so he might spot bears if there are any before I do. He just left a few minutes before. I think he was putting some garbage in the flux capacitor so the truck's fully charged when he gets back. How's that for a morning view? This is what national parks are all about. That's the way back. Look at this rock face. The trail looks like it loops here. I'm going to do clockwise. I don't know why. I just am. This loop section is not maintained so it's just me and a bunch of very hungry looking marmots up ahead. Not only is the trail not maintained, very difficult to follow. You can see the part in the gravel ahead of me but through this rockfall hard to find. Go a little farther anyway. I've got a map on my Gaia app. I can't see the route. I can always use it. Even here are some beautiful flowers. My turnaround point. I made a time commitment to Mickey. So finally the water up here just runs and then just disappears in the rocks. I can have some water, a quick bite to eat and then skedaddle back. All right here's my suggestion. I went through here. I went on the left loop but I lost it going through the rocks and I got impatient so I just went straight up the valley which worked for me. The better route is to go up on the right. I think you can see some people going up and loop around that way. Oh and then some. I counted 137 people on my way down. When I went up I passed three and there was one other fellow ahead of me. It pays to get to trailheads early folks. All right I still have three kilometers left. At least it's all downhill. Now I wish I'd taken Mickey up and offer to at least drop me off and then come back five hours later and pick me up. This feels better. I had a sort of a quick shower outside. We use these little things. I think called scrubbies and they work really well because you can just sort of rinse with it and you don't actually have to rinse it off but having the shower outside you can just wash everything away. It feels so nice and then Mickey did something similar and now we feel good again. I was feeling pretty hot and sweaty after that hike. Our view. This is the Marble Marble Canyon Campground at Kootenay National Park. Yeah it's nice. The campground itself maybe if you wanted to talk about the cons it's perhaps a little close to the highway and there's a hill so you hear that but the campgrounds themselves I really like. They've got a series of loops. Yeah I think there's like nine loops and each loop has maybe about six sites except for one loop. Yeah so it's nice. There's not a lot of cars driving around all the time. The bathroom's clean and functional. It looks a little tired. The whole campsite looks like it's pretty well used. I'm sure it's a very we've noticed a lot of people here just seem to spend one night and carry on but it is nice because you're right across from Marble Canyon so you can do a couple fairly easy hikes. Yesterday it was quite warm. Warmer than we expected because we're at about 1500 meters. Yeah and so we drove into Canmore. We really like it there. There's some interesting businesses and things and yeah it's nice. Yeah and it's just marvelous to be in the Rockies. The mountains are spectacular. They're so big. Yeah so we're really enjoying being here. We live on the west coast and sometimes we drive up to Whistler and we go oh this is so beautiful and so nice and and then we drive here. Yeah and then it's like wow the scale is completely different. So we have some thoughts about continuing. We do have we are continuing up the Icefields Parkway. That was the plan originally and maybe head over to Mount Robson but we're not sure what's going to happen because the temperatures are extreme. There's some heat warnings. We can turn our air conditioning on but we can't really keep up. The batteries can't keep up because it's just so hot. It takes so long to cool the van down. Yeah and Jasper will be plugged in. The drive between Banff and Jasper is just amazing. The Icefields Parkway. We just left the Bow Lake area. You know the summit is about just over 2,000 meters so a little over 6,600 feet and at noon it was already 25 degrees celsius so it's warm and we could tell looking as we towards Jasper there's obviously a fire somewhere. We're just not sure where because we can see the about it and talked about it this morning and decided that the heat is just crazy everywhere. I think the only place that doesn't have heat warnings in BC is on the coast. We only had one night at Wapiti and then anywhere else we're going to go but even areas like Glacier we're going to be in the mid-30s. It's just too hot so anyway we looked at it and we thought let's just head home.