Vacation in Canada

We just got back home from a camping & hiking vacation in the Canadian Rockies.

Wow.

I have always loved the Rocky Mountains down here – have almost always lived in them – and I still do, but the mountains up there are so rugged, austere, and majestic that we both fell in love with the Rockies all over again. I am in great danger of severely abusing superlatives in describing the Canadian Rockies, because of their harsh beauty, that I may sound overly subdued out of caution. In reality I was so profoundly awe-stricken the entire two weeks we were there that I was on overload.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be posting highlights and pictures of our trip. One of the people we met up there (we nick-named him Edmonton because he was from Edmonton and though we talked with him two or three times every day we were in the same campground we never found out his name) said that pictures never show the magnificence of the mountains so he never takes pictures; rather, he just goes back to the mountains to get his fix. Easy for him to say, he is so near the area he can go a few times every year. We took nearly three hundred photos. No, they don’t show the magnificence, not even close to it, but they do show enough you can understand the scenery; and that’s as close as I can show or explain.

We left home on Friday, September 7, 2012 and drove to the Kalispell area where we stayed overnight with friends Dave and Linda. They have a lifestyle very similar to ours with gardening, canning, making fruit leather and so on. Dave is now building a greenhouse/chicken coop like Ben and I have dreamed of for years and envy. Dave and Linda are very resourceful people and had to buy few of the supplies they needed to build it. Sorry I don’t have a picture of it, I just spaced that out. We had such a good time visiting with them that we didn’t leave until nearly noon on Saturday.

Not long after we entered Canada, we were in awe of the mountains.

We camped at the bottom edge of Kootenay National Park and then on Sunday we drove up to the north end to hike up the Stanley Glacier Trail and officially began our adventure. It rained so much that day that even with raincoats we got soaked, sloppy soggy and cold, but we had a great time on that hike and met people from all over the world.