Despite living right beside Banff for the past few months, we’d never actually gone into the park. So after all this time we finally ventured in!
We’d heard that to see the famous lakes, Lake Louise and Moraine Lake, you have to get up at silly o’clock in the morning and arrive by about 6am to get a parking spot. It seems it was a mixture of luck and being slightly out of season that we didn’t have any trouble parking at either lake in the early evening, and they didn’t seem as busy as we had expected. Both lakes were beautiful, particularly Moraine Lake (which had just had a fresh dusting of snow!), but if you are in the area and have a car, make sure to drive over to Jasper National Park and also Kananaskis Country!
We headed up into Jasper as it was getting later and the roads started to get a lot more snow and ice on them. We pulled over for the evening as it didn’t seem to be getting any better and turned in, but being so high up in the mountains this was our coldest night so far.
Jasper was incredible; it’s pretty much Banff on steroids and is well worth the drive! The lakes are beautiful, the mountains are huge and the views you get aren’t like anything else we’ve seen so far – the landscapes just keep on giving! We also got to see even more moose here!
This was also where we went to our first hot springs. The Miette Hot Springs are located at the top of a long, winding mountain road but once you reach the top, you can soak outside in 40+ c water while watching the snow falling off the trees around you! We might have overstayed a little as it took us forever to de-prune!
As much as we loved Jasper, we didn’t have it in us to have a third freezing night so we pushed on to Golden. Once we crossed into British Columbia, we paid a visit to Emerald Lake in Yoho National Park; this is one that many guests at the ranch had told us to visit and we can see why – it was beautiful!
Something that we’ve noticed driving across Canada is how much the landscape seems to change when you cross over province lines – Ontario to Manitoba was very sudden, and so was Alberta to BC!
It may have taken a little longer than we’d expected, but just over a year since touching down in Ontario, we’d finally made it to British Columbia!