Hiking to a summit in Banff

The previous post in this series is here..

Right before entering Banff on the return bus journey from the Glacier, our driver/guide mentions that there is still a few hours for sunset and points to teh local mountain..

"there is a trail from the trail head parking lot that takes you straight to the top of tunnel mountain. it is the highest point in Banff on this side of the river" it is a 4 mile hike and you can do it in a little over 2 hours if you are healthy! it is all a bunch of switch backs that pretty much goes straight up!" 

We googled it and found that this was like going up the last part of Rhus ridge. . after a long day, it was a toss.. but it was only 6:30PM and so we (nay, she..) decided that we will try to summit Tunnel mountain and be back down by 8:30 and have a late dinner before heading back to the hotel. 

The agreement was "no pictures till we reach the summit. That way we can go to the top while we still have energy. On the way back there can be pictures!" . Our entire hiking is group is aware of how I feel about going up without stops. This was the one part of the trip that I did not like signing up for.. hiking alone with San, where she gets all demanding and starts to insult my lack of pace etc.. I like my 20 second standing Shavasanas after every 10 minutes of hiking. This was one straight up hike with no gaps. Kept my mouth shut and kept going as fast as I could. Eventually we made it to the top and were lucky to find a dad and his toddler up there. We got pictures (so did he) and we made the walk back down.. this time I was allowed to take a few pictures. 

This worked out well because the sun was in our face at 6:30 and had gone down by the time we walked back. So the photos came out better than they would have two hours earlier. 

Another one of San's great clicks on this trip.. It is strange for me to hand my camera to her now to take pictures instead of trying to find someone in the crowd who knows how to handle a camera. All good.. (lateaa vandhaalum latestaa vandhirukkaa)

How Banff looks from the top of Tunnel Mountain summit!

We made it back in an hour and 45 minutes and were at the Indian Curry house for a nice hot masala Chai and a delicous dinner! 

We were on our way out and checking out the souvenir shops when it started pouring. We ran to our car and realized there was a parking ticket on the car! we should have used a pickup from our hotel in the morning. 

The road signs in Banff are very bad. I wanted to contest the ticket as there was no sign in the place I parked, but they don't have a way to contest. Apparently the town of Banff is starting to try and improve their parking ticket revenue in recent months. It was not this bad pre COVID per some other tourists and locals we talked to. 

We were happy after all the nature and adventure for the day.. so we just folded the ticket and planned to deal with it later and moved on! 

Here is a tip. Just park in a paid parking lot in the four blocks that comprise Banff downtown.. you are better off that way. 

Here is another tip. Hike tunnel mountain to the summit right around sunset. You get beautiful views on the way back of the entire Banff town and surrounding hills. 

Ending this post with a picture of us.. face showing this time.. from the nice red chairs almost at the summit.. Banff has these two matching red chairs in a lot of highlight places. Loved them!

Finally finished blogs of day 2!  Day 3 had a lot more stops. We had hiked 12 miles on day 2 and we did 16+ on day 3. We hiked a toal of 38 miles between Friday night 8PM to Monday 11AM.The bar keeps going up as we travel these days.

Day 3 posts, starting tomorrow.

Two lakes and a waterfall

The previous post on this series is here..

The bus stopped at a waterfall that flows into a river (where they Freeway goes between the two). This was followed by two more stops at Bow lake and Waterfowl lakes. 

Both these lakes looked similar except for the extent of the "lake beaches" and the picnicing crowds. The scenery was just amazing!

This photograph is thanks to the Belgian professor.. his daughter was telling to him take some vertical and horizontal.. he goes "will even take some diagonal.. how about that?". Turned out great!

We met a large punjabi family of 30+ people with picnic blankets and food spread out in one of the little coves around the lake. We were given half an hour at the stop and everyone in the bus interested in taking photos at the lake had to walk through one of many trails to get to the shore and take pictures. We thought we were going to a quiet spot.. turned out not to be. so we went back around to find a quiet spot to take photos. 

Both these lakes are beautiful. Turqoise waters, clear enough for you to see the bottom pebbles for quite a distance, snow and ice covered mountains in the background..

San's candid shot of me at Waterfowl lakes

Surprisingly, she took a lot of photos of me on this trip and they were all good! Not out of focus, not contrasty, over or under exposed.. just right! That was a big bonus for me on this trip!

if you are not going by the bus tour, stop by both these lakes! There is enough parking in the parking lot at bow lake. For Waterfowl lake, you just stop at the vista point and walk down. 

A video of the stops 

The day wasn't over. We still had lot to do after being dropped off..

A drive on Ice field Parkway

On day 2 of the Banff trip, we were booked on a bus tour to see the Athabasca Glacier. Will write a separate post on the Glacier itself. This post is about the what we saw on the almost all day drive to the place. 

The previous post on this trip is here..

We started at 8AM. We did not know they had a pickup point right outside our hotel. We could have got more sleep! Instead we parked downtown and paid dearly for it. The bus had 23 people plus the driver in it. By the end of the day we were all introduced to everyone and we all got to talk at the various stops. It was an international crowd, folks from BC Canada, Brazil, Australia, UK, Belgium and the two of us representing the US!

The driver was a local 20 year old kid, doing this as a summer job. Hindsight being 20/20, we realized at the glacier that we could have just driven to the Glacier ride point in our rental car in an hour and 15 minutes with stops on the way and saved a good 2 hours to do something else. While it is true that there is only one company that is allowed to ride the monster trucks on the Glacier (Columbia IceField), you don't have to go in a bus from Banff to that place!! You can directly go there and get tickets. 

That said, we still enjoyed being passengers, interacting with strangers and stopping at all these points that the kid stopped the bus at, which we would not have otherwise seen. (he took us to vista points that were not the main parking lots.. which helped get great shots with no crowd in the background!). So from that point, it was a big plus. The only time we could have saved was for waiting for 23 people getting in and out of the bus at every stop instead of just the two of us. The kid did a great job of entertaining us during the drive! 

There was a much bigger plus. He stopped when he saw a car slow down in front of us (I would not have) and we got to see a bear walk by us, up  close and personal.. that was the highlight of the drive.

We also had lunch at a nice quiet picnic spot next to the river. 

This drive on Ice field parkway is very scenic. We go all along the bow river all the way from Banff to Jasper National park. The drive in the car would have taken 2 1/2 hours, but we started at 8 and reached at 12:30 including all the photo stops. 

The spots we could not stop at on the way up, we did on the way down. 

First stop: The Lake Louise Village visitor center. This place had a bunch of places to get breakfast and coffee and it was the first rest stop after an hour plus of driving. Every place had a long line. We were lucky to get some breakfast in the Trailhead Cafe, where the line was at least moving! San had a Vegan Samosa which she rated highly!

We started all smiles.. a good sign. This was in the parking lot waiting for the bus. Did I mention we were early? This is also a "warmup selfie" !

Next stop: Herbert lake

We walked through spruce and aspen tree lined trails to the lake (this was our first of many such lake shore visits over the next 48 hours!)

the path ends and voila... the shades of green and blue and the transparent water hits you!

Next stop.. lunch at Coleman creek..

Next stop (more like slow down..) BEAR!! Unfortunately we could not open the windows in the bus.. this is the best I could get with the SLR from the other side of the bus through a tinted window.. it was an exciting thing for us to see this bear walk along the freeway!

at this point I would like to mention that we were expecting to see a lot of animals on the drive.. but the only other non human creature we saw during that day was this ground squirrel at the lunch stop near the river. 

Last but one stop was a waterfalls across the mountains.. there was a family of four from Belgium. The couple and their two daughters exactly 3 years older than our two girls. Their girls helped us take a lot of photos. This was a good shot of us.. no falls, but I love this picture .. so it goes in the blog!

A video that captures all these stops including the "bear sighting". 

If you want to do things fast, just go by yourself from Banff to Jasper. (then again, you might save an hour tops.. given you have to get a pass .. the bus already had a pass and was waved in).  If you want to just sit back, relax and meet folks and go at a slow pace (if you have more than two days to cover the place), then take the bus tour from Banff. It is actually a decent experience.  They also give you a packed lunch, water bottles etc. (Veggie option included, which again was rated highly by San). 

We enjoyed the drive and the group of people we ended up with!

Now that I am able to sit at a laptop and write longer posts, going to get back to the routine! The next post on the actual Glacier walk tomorrow.. 

Food to spice up your memories!

The previous post in this series is here..

If you are in Banff and feel like having great food, just hit Indian Curry house. I am not saying it because it is a desi place. It is just great food, period!

We were lucky to try this place out on day 1. It is not on the ground floor with a view of the restaurant from teh street. This is on the top floor of the main storefront with shops. We did not know what to make of the staircase we had to climb between two souvenir shops to get there at first.

Ok, the bear is a distraction for this post.. but it happened to be right at the entrance.. Banff seems to have these bears for kids to take pictures with at every popular spot. Every visitor center has one of these.

We were welcomed with a smile even though there were lots of groups waiting. We were lucky it was only the two of us. So "Table for two" was easy. We took a corner spot.

The view from the windows with the snow covered peaks was something! We had literally just reached Baff from Calgary and we were still getting used to the fact that all places in Banff have amazing views! 

The service was nice. We asked for some hot masala Chai asap as we did not know how long it would take for the food to show up. The guy asked us if we want extra ginger in it. Our first thought was "are you guys for real? please.. thanks for asking!". The Chai did not disappoint after that long flight and drive!

The food came reasonably fast.. the best part was the taste. I think this is the happiest photo of me in the trip.. 

The butter naan and paneer butter masala are the best I have tasted in the last 5 years. Truly mouth watering. They got the smoky flavor in the butter paneer just right!  Given this is a favorite dish by which I measure places by, this restaurant is somewhere up there in my ranking!

We loved this place. San usually wants to try out different cuisines in new places.. if the food was not this great, we would have switched to Italian, Mexican, Thai, Chinese, etc. over next few days..probably in that very order.. But given she loved the chaat, on day 2 after we came back from a long journey, we just stopped right here. This time we tried daal and butter rotis and rice and a lot more chai. We even took some parathas to go for the next mornings hike as we had a 4:30 AM start. That was amazing as well.

We wanted to ask about the owner after we had the food and he came and talked to us. He has been doing this for 12 years. Turns out the owner is a south Indian guy by the name of Vivek. We had a nice chat with this guy and he gave us some tips on other places to see on the last day out on the way out of Banff and his entire staff was very nice! 

We never thought we would find a place like this in Banff with amazing desi food. San thinks I was pampered on this trip in every way, and she is right!

The best thing I have to thank her for on this trip is finding this place! I am still drooling thinking of that paneer butter masala..

Next time we visit Banff, know where I am headed, right after checking into the hotel!

Strongly recommend this place! 

ps. If you are a group of 8+, don't extrapolate the time based on our experience. Larger groups were waiting outside to be seated for 30 mins. If you are group of 4 or less, you can get in and out pretty fast!

pps. if you have food allergies, you can tell the folks here and they accomodate. Another big plus, at least for me!

Surprise point and Bow falls trail - Banff National Park

The previous post on this series is here..

After dinner, we drove to the surprise point outlook and took a walk. You get a beautiful view of the historic Fairmont Hotel while hearing the roaring sound of the water going between the view point and the hotel.

we had purple skies!

It was us and another asian couple there at the vista point. We were happy to see someone else there as they were! we took photos for each other and off we went to the Bow falls trail. 

This is an amazing trail. Well maintained, just gorgeous attention to detail.. 

then there is the falls.. it is wide and the water flow is something to see! The setting sun (at 10PM) made for interesting hues. By the time we went up the trail and took the photo on the bench (at the top of this post) and got back down, the rest of the folks were gone. We had spent an hour and a half here without realizing it. The walk was not tiring and we were smiling from ear to ear! This place was just beautiful and fresh and inspiring! 

It started getting a little chilly at that point and we decided we had spent good time here. We got back to the hotel and it was still bright out. The sunlight finally went down at 10:30 PM and I could make out the light through the shades even at 11! We had to get some sleep as there was a long full day planned for Saturday. Banff is one hour ahead in time compared to California, so it was still early for us to sleep, but we closed all the blinds (reminded us of Alaska!) and got some shut eye!

This video shows you bow falls and the beautiful trail..

Had I known it was going to be this pretty, would have rushed to the hotel to grab the SLR as well.. after this, had the SLR on me throught the rest of the trip!

If you visit Banff, check sunset timings and dress accordingly to see bow falls at sunset time or golden hour.. just breathtaking!

Not to be missed!