Road Trip Pt. 2

The alarm went off on Day 4 at 6:00 in the morning.  By 7:00, we were dressed, fed, and back in the car with the gas tank filled. We were headed for Banff National Park, somewhere the three of us had always wanted to go.

DD2 in particular liked the wildlife bridges that had been built in several locations around the park. She had seen models of them, but never the real deal, so was quite excited to see them for herself.

Unfortunately, it was raining more often than not. So we didn't get out to do any real hiking.  As the morning progressed, the skies cleared, and we did make a short jaunt up a trail (where we decided it was too steep, too wet, and we weren't properly equipped) and made a few stops for photos.

Several times, we had to stop for construction, and once for a very recent rock slide to be cleared.  If I couldn't get out of the car to take photos, I often took them out of the rolled down window.  I looked like this a lot:

 Even with the cloud cover and peek a boo sun, the scenery was awesome.

snow on the mountain!

There were also many waterfalls, some we could view right from the road, and others we had to take a short (or not so short) hike to.  As the day went on, the sun came mostly out, we drove from Banff National Park into Jasper National Park.  Honestly, the day ran together and I'm having a hard time now remembering which waterfall was which and in what park.

At the Athabascan Falls, we could view the river and falls from several locations.  First, atop the falls.  Then, we walked down through the old abandoned river channel, where steps had been built to aide in navigation, and viewed the scenery from the river bottom.

down the stairs

looking up the stairs

breath taking view of the river from near the bottom

While our mileage only ticked off about eight hours from our total journey, it was a long day.  Many stops for photo ops, pauses for construction, and dinner in Jasper.  As the sun was getting low, and the light slanted across the mountains, we made our way to Grande Cache where we stopped for the night.

Nearly to our final destination of the day, we spotted our first bears!  Far off the road was a black bear, that I managed to (kind of) get a picture of.

We also saw our first grizzly bear, right on the embankment beside the road at dusk.  DH turned around in hopes of getting a picture, but the bear loped up and over the hill.  It stood up a few times to get a peek at us, and we decided we'd best get driving before it decided to come down and check out our car!

Pt 3 coming soon. . . with more bears!