July 8--Goodbye Jasper, Hello Banff

We packed up and headed to Banff National Park on the connecting highway, the Icefields Parkway. This highway is called “the most beautiful highway in the world.” That’s certainly true for me. The parkway is a passage between tall, craggy mountains covered with glaciers. We’ve seen glaciers in Alaska & Glacier National Park, but the ice fields along this parkway were beyond anything we had ever seen. The largest of the ice fields, the Columbia Icefield, is the largest ice field south of the Arctic Circle.
It was very cold the day we moved from one park to another and the sky was gloomy so, as usual, my poor little camera just couldn’t do justice to the views. We only took the one picture of a glacier because neither one of us has a camera that can adequately capture large vistas. The falls are called Tangle Falls. I found a picture of them on Google Images and was so excited to see the real thing. I even posed in front of them--did you know that if you elongate a picture, you look skinny????
Since we had spent most of the day driving and stopping at observation points, we decided to drive into Banff Town. (We are camped outside of Lake Louise.) We took the Bow Valley Parkway and saw the grizzly bear. Yes, that is the grizzly bear’s rear end. You know, it looked a lot closer than the picture. Other than goats and bears, the wildlife is sparse although every park brochure claims an abundance of wildlife. Can’t prove that by us so far. We thought Jasper Park was beautiful, but Banff surpasses Jasper. We felt claustrophobic in Banff Town--so many people crowded on sidewalks and in small stores. I’m glad we decided to stay in campground close to Lake Louise, which is much smaller and more relaxed.