We were up bright and early on Wednesday and set off on the long drive north to Jasper along the Columbia Icefield Parkway which proved to be spectacular, as we'd expected. The weather was probably the best we'd had in the Rockies, clear blue skies and a fresh dusting of snow on some of the high peaks. We took a few photos along the way and stopped for coffee at the Saskatchewan Crossing. The tourist centre assistant in Canmore had recommended the short walk fro...

So that we would be able to spend a good while exploring the Columbia Icefields on our way to Jasper on Wednesday we needed to get all our packing and the condo cleaning done today. Thus the morning was spent, well packing and cleaning the condo! We've found that our house swappers tend to tumble dry all washing (there is nowhere to hang washing to dry either inside or out) and that it seems they don't do any ironing either. Indeed our Canmore condo didn't have a...

Monday was our long anticipated trip to Lake Louise. We'd been advised to avoid the weekend crowds. So after a reasonably early start we were surprised at the number of coaches and cars already in the car park! As ever though, most didn't stray much beyond the first view point and whilst we didn't have the lakeside trail totally to ourselves the crowds were left behind. As you can see from the photos Lake Louise is a wonderful, bright blue milk. It was easy to se...

You'd have thought we'd have learnt our lesson about checking that trails were open so hard to believe we set off again to walk a trail that turned out to be closed. Jill had looked on the trail closed list for Banff National Park but sadly this wasn't really very helpful as the Galatea Creek Trail to Lillian Lake walk we planned was in Kananaskis Country. We did explore a little along this trail, a path going in the other direction to the one we planned was open...

Feeling proud of ourselves we made an earlyish start (we're not among the world's natural early risers) to avoid the weekend crowds that would be making their way to Sunshine Meadows, a high alpine plain reached by bus up a ski-access road. Unfortunately it would have been better to have been able to have been proud of our full-planning for this trip. If we'd researched fully we'd have known that all of the Sunshine trails were still closed following the damage c...