The Other Don Kelly

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.

This is the eleventh 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.

This was the day we left the parks and the parkways behind, and our final ride day together. We traveled down the Banff Heritage Trail, a bike path alongside the Trans-Canada Highway between the towns of Banff and Canmore…

The bike path was pretty mellow, just a roll down the hill to the next town, and the vibe was a lot like any local rail-trail, with plenty of people doing what looked like their regular exercise and recreational, out-and-back rides. We were back in the real world, except that we were still surrounded by mountains and beautiful scenery, and wildlife was still a thing — Anne even saw a gray wolf at one point. Luckily it was on the other side of the Trans-Canada Highway’s wildlife protection fence, until we went a bit further and passed through a gate, back into the hungry wilderness… But it was a short ride for all that, and before we knew it we reached our final destination.

Canmore

Canmore had been a coal mining town until 1979 when the mines closed, and reconfigured itself for outdoor sports just in time to be a part of the 1982 Winter Olympics in Calgary — and that’s what put it on the map. It’s a beautiful town, just outside the national park and a tourist destination in its own right — mountain biking in summer, XC skiing in winter — but more charming and less crowded than the towns of Banff and Lake Louise. There was a considerable residential area, and a “real town” shopping district with supermarkets, hardware stores and so on, besides the more touristy “restaurant row,” which was closed to auto traffic and full of outdoor dining, souvenir stands and bike shops. Julie had an appointment at one of them (Outside Bikes) to drop her bike off for packing, and while we were there we got a recommendation for lunch/dinner at their go-to, a brewpub just around the corner. House-smoked brisket sandwiches and cold brews — delicious! After lunch we made our way to the Alpine Club Hostel, our lodging for the night. That was pretty much all she wrote for me, though I think Anne and Julie stayed up a bit later.

Anyway, here are some shots from the day’s ride, and one photo I took from the porch of our hostel:

This is the eleventh 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.

This would be our longest ride day. We would go just about 40 miles (luckily, they were easy miles) on the Bow Valley Parkway, from the hostel in Lake Louise to our campsite just outside Banff.

The Bow Valley Parkway was very pretty, as pretty as the Icefields Parkway, and it was obvious we were coming into more temperate ecosystems — the plants were a little more like home, and a bit thicker on the ground too. The ride was mostly uneventful, but we did have to stop to let a young bear cross the road at one point. We rode on, stopping at scenic places with names like Morant’s Curve, Castle Mountain, Moose Meadows, and Vermilion Lakes…

Banff, the town itself, was considerably less idyllic and more hectic than the ride there. We stopped at the first place we saw (mistake), a Tim Horton’s (big mistake), and when we parked the bikes I saw a woman painting her be-stickered and graffiti-covered car with a paintbrush and gray house paint. I said hello (huge mistake) and she bombarded me with a torrent of pressured speech about the car and bad decisions, etc; we retreated into the Tim Horton’s, but it was a mob scene so we hopped back on our bikes and rode straight to our campsite, another mile or so up the road.

This was Tunnel Mountain Village I, and it was awesome: a really big place but spacious and comfortable, with running water and showers and beautiful views everywhere. We showered, ate, took a walk around our new neighborhood, and fell back into our tents.

This is the tenth in a series of posts about our bicycling trip down the Icefield Parkway, through Jasper and Banff National Parks in Alberta, Canada. The full series can be found here.

We had two overnights at the Lake Louise Hostel, and Tuesday was our day for exploring the area. The town of Lake Louise isn’t very big — some hotels, a few shops — but it is the hub for a lot of the more iconic things to do in Banff National Park; we chose to ride back to the lake, on the Tramway Trail rather than that twisty mountain road, and then hike from there up to the famous Tea House next to Lake Agnes. I’ll skip the bike maps for this since we just rode a few miles, but here are a few photos from the ride and our first view of Lake Louise:

Lake Louise itself was beautiful, but the area immediately around it was incredibly crowded so we didn’t stick around, we just started to climb:

I expected our day to be a leisurely ramble around a few lakes, followed by tea at some lonely, isolated bastion of decorum, maybe even some kind of Zen mountain retreat… Well there were lakes, and tea, but the “ramble” was decidedly more rugged than I was envisioning, and the trail to the tea house was extremely popular — I was constantly being surprised by the hardiness of our fellow tourists. There were children, and parents and grandparents, all cheerfully marching along with us up the ten percent grade (though the trail was smooth and wide, so it really wasn’t too bad), and we arrived at the tea house at what looked like the morning rush. We got our tea and some fresh baked pastries, and had our tea party along the lake. Here are some pictures from our hike up:

The tea house itself was a marvel, without electricity or running water, and accessible only on foot, even for resupply. It was run by a bunch of cheerful, rugged young park interns, who were constantly baking more pastries and biscuits and selling tea as fast as they could hand it out. Things quieted down considerably after a short while, and when the crowd thinned out we did the same. (On the way back down to the lake, we actually ran into some of the people who helped Julie with the bus situation the day before.)

Then we were back down at Lake Louise again, and I got some more shots of the lake, as well as of the luxurious old hotel, the Chateau Lake Louise:

We walked back through the crowds and the buses and cars, and then rode the Tramway Trail back to town:

We explored town some more, then made made dinner at the hostel. I personally crashed at this point, as my inner ear and sinuses were feeling pretty miserable.