This is the last of our adventures in the Banff area. Looks like we should have done this first as the wildfire smoke was the worst we have seen today. On the 30 mile trip from our site in Lake Louise to the town of Banff we could barely see the mountains just next to us. And the main purpose for the gondola trip was to view the area from the top of Sulfur Mountain!
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| On our way to the gondola on the south side of Banff. |
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| Walking to the Banff Hot Springs, the wrong way to the gondola! Same parking lot! |
We had no issue finding the parking lot for the gondola ride; however both Google and Garmin tried to lead us to slightly different places. Neither system has worked very well for us in Canada. Once we were parked we had no idea where to go to get to the gondola. The parking lot serves 3 places really, the trail to hike up Sulfur Mountain, the Hot Springs, and the Gondola. Of course we tried the other 2 things before we figured out where the gondola was. But no fear, we were still 10 minutes early, yeah us!
When you purchase a ticket you get to pick a date and time for your ride up to the top. The times are for every 10 minutes and they let you in line 10 minutes before your appointed time. The cue system seemed to work very well, I was impressed.
The gondola ride is an enclosed cable car that holds 4 people. The cable runs continuously so getting on is done very quickly. The ride up takes just a few minutes. The mountain is at around 7500 feet and the ground is about 4,000 feet so we did a climb of about 3,500 feet. That was enough to make our ears fill up by the time we got to the top!
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| I was surprised that I wasn't claustrophobic! |
We have both done this sort of thing in Switzerland and this is very similar but just not as high in elevation. Now at the top of the mountain we see that we are in a 4 floor building with loads of windows for looking out. There was a long wooden walkway outside so you could walk up to the highest point of the mountain a couple of hundred feet higher than where we were.
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| The building you arrive in from the gondola |
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| The view of the observation point that we walked to from the gondola building. |
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| View with loads of smoke! |
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| View of the town of Banff from the top of Sulfur Mountain. |
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| Patty with another chipmunk friend. These are being fed by tourists as they are so tame. |
We walked the wooden walkway to the top and we did a bit of tourist shopping in the building. After that we decided to have lunch there before heading back to our site. Again the lunch was great and, as usual, it was pricy but that is expected in a tourist trap like this. I am just amazed at how good the food has been I these tourist traps though.
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| Our lunch place on top of the mountain |
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| A nice smokey view from our lunch place. |
After lunch we headed back down on the gondola which was not crowded at all now. After the rush in the morning the smoke was worse now so people were just not going up and we can’t blame them. Even with the smoke we did get some nice views of Banff. We could just imagine how great the views would have been without the smoke though.
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| A cool trike. Looked this up and it is German built. It was in the gondola parking lot. |
We filled up the truck fuel tank in Banff and then went back to our site for a short nap. Then we headed into the tourist area of Lake Louise to just check it out before we leave in the morning.
The Lake Louise tourist area wasn’t anything spectacular at all. It was mostly tour companies. There was a small grocery store so we picked up a few essentials. Then we ended the visit with an ice cream at a shop there. This was the first ice cream that wasn’t spectacular. This was just regular ice cream and we didn’t get much for a huge price. Not bad to have just one not so good experience out of so many great ones!
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| View from the parking lot of the tourist trap shopping district of Lake Louise. |
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| We liked these glasses. We are going to try to purchase these on-line when we get back to Texas. They are plastic! |
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| We see a lot of black-billed magpies here. Cool birds. |
We ended the day with a hike on one of the trails that followed along a mountain stream that paralleled our campground.
That was a great end to a great visit to Banff and Jasper National parks in Alberta Canada.
Now we are at the end of our Banff visit. I would give the visit here very high marks. It was definitely a better experience than that of Glacier and the Grand Tetons National Parks in the USA. The USA parks are great too but Banff was just better. We are very happy we visited here!
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| Last view of our Lake Louise Campground site in the Banff Canadian National Park. |
Now we are off for a day at the Radium Hot Springs about 80 miles south.
Stay tuned!
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