This is the twelfth in a series of posts about our bicycling trip from Jasper to Canmore, via the Icefields and Bow Valley Parkways, through Jasper and Banff National Parks in Alberta, Canada. The full series can be found here.
Friday: A Goodbye To Julie
Canmore was the end of the line for our bike tour. Anne and I had plans to stay a few days in town, but Julie would be heading home. We all stayed that first/last night at the Alpine Club hostel, which was beautiful, and which we (Anne and I) would return to later in the week. Some photos I took while I was drinking my morning coffee:
That first photo is a shot of the iconic Three Sisters, and I’m pretty sure that’s Mount Rundle on the right in the second shot.
Unfortunately, this was the end of our travel fellowship — Julie would be taking the shuttle from Canmore to Calgary, where she would catch her flight back home. Here she is with her bike boxed up and her bag packed, waiting for her ride to the shuttle pickup:
Julie had to make her way (with all her stuff) from the bike shop to the shuttle pickup a mile away, but luckily Lyle (our Warm Showers host) had a pickup truck and offered to give her a lift, even though they weren’t expecting to have to host us until around 5:00. This was our first contact with Lyle, and the first but not the last time we got to experience his decency and hospitality.
We would be staying for the next several days in Lyle and Kirsten’s home. Our plan was to arrive sometime early evening so we wouldn’t be in their hair all day, and so Anne and I did some more shopping and explored the town.
We arrived at their home just around dinnertime, and found that they gave us their entire upstairs to use — it was almost a suite, complete with an incredible shower in the bathroom, almost like a cross between a rainforest and a steam bath. They made an incredible dinner, and we all hung out and got acquainted, chatting and comparing notes about biking and other sports, family, and former jobs (we were all retired). They were a very interesting couple. Lyle had been an engineer, but I think he played the game at a higher level than I did, and he’d had postings all over the world. They’d lived in Scotland, Germany, and Vietnam as well as Calgary. He was also a car enthusiast, and something of a gadgeteer, especially when it came to cooking: espresso machine, grill and smoker, sous vide cooker…
Saturday: The Hike
We woke up on Saturday, looking for something to do for the day, and our hosts suggested a hike. They had one particular hike in mind, one they liked but the trailhead was not nearby, so they offered use of their car to get there — their Porsche SUV. (They really did treat us like royalty.) Driving a Porsche sounds like fun, but I was terrified of damaging it, and the road to the trailhead turned out to be a twisty, unpaved mountain road, complete with mountain goats wandering around and licking up salt from the road…
Well we made it to the trailhead without incident and started up the hill, though we weren’t 100% sure we were on the trail a lot of the time. I didn’t have my GPS and we had no topo map; all we had to show is the way was a guidebook page on my phone that I’d photographed earlier. The trail, or what we supposed was the trail, was more rugged than we expected, so we turned around before reaching the top. Oh well, but what we did of the hike was well worth it.
For those following along at home, the trail we attempted was the Three Sisters Pass Trail. Some photos:
Two Rides (Sunday and Monday)
Anne and I had rented high end, full suspension mountain bikes in town, and once again our hosts hooked us up, this time showing us around the excellent riding near Canmore. The first day we rode from town, and did some trails called Horseshoe and G8, if I heard Lyle correctly.
Anne had mechanical difficulties with her seatpost and went back to the rental place, and Kirsten was dealing with some wrist issues and had to bail, so for a good chunk it was just me and Lyle. We had a lot of fun, but it was all I could do to hold on to the pace — he was fast.
Eventually we looped around, and Anne caught up with us, and we rode a bit more before her cursed rental bike had more troubles. At that point we just rode down the hill to a microbrewery where we met Kirsten. We hung out there for quite a while, and it was cool to see the place fill up with mountain bikers as time went on.
Our second ride took us back out to where we hiked, and we did a point-to-point ride, complete with shuttles, on a section of the High Rocky Trail. We were joined by Lyle’s friend Dave, another strong rider, who also loaned Anne his wife’s bike.
This was a great ride on some twisty, rolling singletrack, very different terrain and soil from back home but still reminiscent of places like Raystown. (Lyle told me that the trails had been made by machine, which would be a lot like Raystown). Dave was, if anything, even faster, and we all had a merry chase up and down the trail, occasionally yodeling and shouting to warn the bears off. This trail sort of paralleled the dirt road, which was next to a long thin lake, and every so often we came to a clearing with incredible views.
On the way back to town we stopped at the Canmore Nordic Centre, where Lyle and Kirsten showed us around. The Nordic Centre is a provincial park in its own right, with mountain bike trails all through the woods, but it’s also their Olympic-level winter sports arena, the one that was built for Calgary ’88. (Lyle and Kirsten, and their kids, are all very athletic, and Lyle is an official in the Canadian national governing body for biathlon, a sort of mix of XC-skiing and shooting.) You could tell they really loved their town, with its bike trails and all its awesome facilities and amenities, and it was a pleasure to have them show it all to us.
We came back to town and cleaned up, and then we all went out for pizza. This was our goodbye dinner with our hosts: we would be relocating back to the hostel for our last night in town. Moving on was a little sad, and they even offered to let us stay that one last night but we’d taken up enough of their time and hospitality, and we knew they had to get back to living their own lives.
Our vacation wasn’t quite over, but it was starting to wind down.
