Mount Stephen Fossil Site

November 1, 2023July 11, 2024 / Maria / 1 Comment

After a quick trip through Kootenay National Park, our Rocky Mountain road trip continued into Banff and Yoho National Parks. I’ve been to Banff a few times since the pandemic, so Banff was really more of a stopover on the way to Yoho, which was the highlight for the second half of our trip. Unfortunately, there aren’t as many frontcountry camping options in Yoho, and given that it was the long weekend, the only campsite we could get was in Lake Louise.

It was still cool though because the last time I camped in Banff, I stayed at the Tunnel Mountain campground, so at least I got to try something new! Camping in Banff is really unlike anywhere else I’ve ever camped. It’s so incredibly popular, not just in Canada, but all over the world, so it has some really unique campsites. I can’t think of anywhere else except the National Parks in the Rocky Mountains where there are multiple campgrounds boasting hundreds of car-camping sites. So we were able to get a site for 2 nights with minimal advance planning, which was good because even with almost 400 sites in this campground alone, it was sold out by the time the long weekend actually arrived!

The other wild thing about the campground is that it’s surrounded by an electric fence to make it completely bearproof! Even so, they still occasionally wander in, so you still have to be bear safe, but it’s a cool idea. We arrived in the late afternoon and took it easy for a few hours. Our friend, Jason, from the Rockwall Trail had finished his thru hike on his section of the GDT, so he met up with us to celebrate! We opted to check out the Station Restaurant, which is a restaurant that’s been set up in the old school Railway Station. It even has some tables in an old railway car! The food was delicious and we chowed down on our second elk burger of the trip before heading back for an early night.

We had to go to bed early because we had an early rise for our guided hike to Mount Stephen. Since I started dating Seth 12 years ago, I learned that there is an incredibly important fossil site in Yoho National Park called the Burgess Shale. Seth’s been dying to visit it for years, so when we planned a trip to Yoho, I couldn’t help but check out the guided hikes. There was still some availability, so I booked a visit, even though I had a lot of guilt over going without Seth. Bbut it was honestly so much fun, I’d be more than happy to go again with him in the future!

The Burgess Shale is a UNESCO world heritage site that is recognized around the world as one of the most well preserved, and oldest, examples of soft-bodied marine animals, dating back 508 million years to the middle Cambrian era. The entire site is protected, so the only way you can visit it is on a guided hike with either Parks Canada or the Geoscience Foundation. There’s two locations to choose from, either Walcott Quarry or Mount Stephen. Walcott Quarry is 22km round trip, while Mount Stephen is 8km. The catch is that both have over 800m of elevation, which makes Mount Stephen an incredibly steep and taxing hike, with a grade of ~20% for the majority of the hike.

I originally picked Mount Stephen because I thought Walcott Quarry was the more famous of the two sites, so I figured I’d save that one to do with Seth. Now that I have visited, I don’t think one is more famous than the other, but I think I made the right choice because I went with two other hikers, so we enjoyed the challenge of Mount Stephen.

Our tour was with Parks Canada. There was 10 people on the tour and we left from the visitor center in Field at 7am (hence the early wake-up call). Our guide seemed delighted with our group because everyone was pretty fit, so we made a really good pace on the hike. It’s honestly a top-notch tour and we learned so much historical and scientific information on the tour. The Mount Stephen site was discovered first and is credited to Charles Walcott in the early 1900’s, but we learned that Walcott is really the one who made the site famous, but didn’t really discover it.

It was likely first discovered by the local first nations groups, and then later by a surveyor for the railroad. It was just Walcott that really understood what he was looking at and drew attention to the site. Walcott collected over 65,000 fossils between the two sites and for many years, anyone could hike up to the site and take a fossil. That’s not the case now. You must be accompanied with a registered guide and if you try to sneak in otherwise, there’s several cameras that text your photo directly to the park warden, who will then come and escort you down with an automatic appearance in court. But with a guide you can enjoy the experience in peace!

It’s definitely a steep hike. It’s a slog the entire way up. You break out of the trees about 75% through the hike and we had a nice break along the ridge before continuing up another steep climb to the quarry. The quarry is a shale rock site literally located right on the side of the mountain. It has incredible views of Field and the surrounding mountains and I would have been willing to do the tour just for the views! But the fossils are really unreal. Like I said, they’re 508 million years old and incredibly well preserved. The most recognizable are the trilobites, but our group was more enamoured by the anomolocaris (replica pictured above on the left).

We had an hour to eat our lunch and freely explore in the quarry. Hundreds of thousands of fossils have been removed from the quarry and yet almost every single rock you look at has at least 1 fossil, if not dozens, on it. You can either walk through the quarry, examining larger fossils as you go, or you can sit down and get close up with all the unique little fossils. Our guide shared magnifying glasses and identification booklets and we all got lost back in time for an hour. Plus enjoy the pica that entertained me during my lunch pictured below!

We were incredibly lucky weather-wise. It was threatening rain on us all morning, which can make the fossils a bit hard to see and make the quarry quite slippery. But the rain held off until we were finally starting to pack up, and then we finished packing up in a hurry to slowly head back down. Apparently we were a bit faster than the average group, so we had a bit longer in the quarry and finished the entire hike in ~7 hours, but usually the guide allots for 8 hours to run the tour. She dropped us back at the visitor centre around 2pm.

We were all in awe the entire time and it was such a fun way to learn about natural history. I still have the guilt from going without Seth, but I can’t wait to return for Walcott Quarry. Unfortunately, it was Carolyn’s last day with us as she had to go back to work. She’d been planning to drive about halfway back to Vancouver, but with our early finish, she ending up powering the entire way back home that night. Me and Brandon enjoyed a delicious lunch at the Truffle Pig in Field instead and then returned to the Lake Louise campground to pack for our next adventure: Lake O’Hara!

Ski Resort Series: Lake Louise

March 30, 2022March 30, 2022 / Maria / 1 Comment

Lake Louise was undoubtedly the most popular of the Banff resorts when we visited. I suspect it draws the most tourists because of its association with the famous lake, as well as it also attracts a lot of locals to its open alpine skiing and back bowls. Plus, the awesome views of the surrounding mountains don’t hurt!

Lake Louise is about a 45 minute drive from Banff, so it is the furthest, though I regularly drive 2 hours to Whistler each way in a single day, so I didn’t find the drive too bad. There are some accommodations in Lake Louise if you’re just there to ski and want to stay nearby, but then I think your restaurant choices would be a lot more limited than if you stayed in Banff.

Of the three resorts, I found Lake Louise had the most confusing parking. Norquay and Sunshine have straightforward massive lots, but Lake Louise has several smaller lots and several sections of the lot are allocated specifically for VIPs or pay parking. Clearly we weren’t VIPs and we didn’t want to pay, so we ended up parking in the road parking – it wasn’t a long walk to the resort, but the longest of the 3 resorts and we were annoyed to walk past the huge empty VIP lot right next to the lodge.

Lake Louise had a pretty different set-up than Sunshine. At Sunshine, I found a lot of the lifts went to the same locations but had different bases from which to board at the bottom. Whereas at Lake Louise, a lot of the lifts left from the same central area at the bottom and went to different parts of the mountain, which I think is a bit preferable. The main difference is that the Lake Louise base is at the same elevation as the highway, whereas at Sunshine you take a gondola up to the base and at Norquay you drive several switchbacks up the mountain. As a result, I found the ski conditions at Lake Louise were unfortunately, the worst of the 3 mountains.

It’s partially because of the weather and timing of when we visited that we didn’t get any powder, but overall, I found Louise to be icier because it’s a lower elevation mountain. I also found the runs to be more confusing because it’s a lot of alpine, so there’s not really any discernible runs in a lot of locations. In some ways I really liked that because you could really ski wherever you wanted, but it also made it hard to figure out where you were and we ended up going down a few more advanced runs because we got lost. Not that big a deal, but since it was an icy day, it wasn’t the best conditions for challenging yourself.

So it was a bit of a rough start as we figured out the mountain, but we did still have a good time. We started off on Glacier chair and did a few runs on the Top of the World chair before going up Summit chair once to see the view from the highest point. I liked this area, but it’s where we kept making mistakes and ended up down a gully a few times. One of the biggest attractions at Lake Louise is the back bowls, which is pretty much just all free black run skiing. My biggest regret is that we didn’t ski the back bowl in the morning when we had fresh legs and decent visibility. We were a little bit intimidated by it and there’s so much to explore, so we decided to save it for later.

After a few runs up at the top we switched over to the Grizzly gondola and explored around some of the bottom part of the mountain. Lake Louise is deceivingly large. Sunshine Village felt large because the lifts are spread out and there’s so many different areas, whereas Lake Louise is more concentrated, but still has a lot of runs, many of which I think are longer than at Sunshine. We didn’t do as many runs in the morning, mostly because it was just taking us longer to do each run.

We had decided to buy lunch at Lake Louise, which was a good decision because packed lunches aren’t allowed in the Lodge of Ten Peaks (though you can eat them at Whiskeyjack Lodge). The nice thing about Louise was that there were several lodges, I don’t know how busy it was over at Temple Lodge, but we found Lodge of Ten Peaks to be a lot less crowded than at Sunshine.

In the afternoon we made our way over towards the backside of the mountain to get the areas we hadn’t yet explored. We did a few runs on Ptarmigan chair and a few on Larch chair. I ended up really liking the Larch area, likely because it had some easier runs, or maybe because they are more well defined. I think I would really like Lake Louise if I got to ski it more often, but because I only had one day, I wanted to get a lot a variety and in the alpine, I guess I felt like I was just skiing the same thing run after run. It’s why it’s nice to have more than one day at a ski resort, because you get to try everything on the first day, and then return to areas you liked or try things you missed on the second day.

Emily wasn’t really keen to do the back bowls at all, but like Goat Mountain at Sunshine, I still really wanted to tackle every part of the mountain, so I convinced her to do one run with me. We got to scope it out a bit more on the Paradise chair, which runs up the back of the mountain, and I think on a good powder day I would be pretty comfortable skiing in the back bowl (at least in the area under Paradise chair, which is black diamonds as opposed to double blacks). Unfortunately, our mistake was waiting too late in the day. We took the one easy run down the back bowl, but it had really bad flat light when we did it and we felt like we were skiing blind, so we weren’t inclined to try a second run, hence why I say I wish we’d done it in the morning.

Anyways, sometimes you live and learn. We still ended up having a great time at Lake Louise and surprisingly Emily liked it more than me. I can’t really pinpoint why, but of the three, Lake Louise was probably my least favourite. I may get slammed for that because not a lot of people seem to like Norquay, so I’m inclined to blame the weather on this occasion (we got some great powder at Norquay). In any case, I won’t be too quick to judge it and I would definitely return to try it again and properly ski the back bowl. Overall I think it might just be the vibe that I got from Lake Louise. It was more crowded and seemed a bit more elitist than the others, so I’d be just as happy to ski at Sunshine or Norquay as well. Either way, it’s definitely an iconic resort.

Hiking the Plain of 6 Glaciers

July 14, 2021July 15, 2021 / Maria / Leave a comment

Our second hike in Banff National Park in August was The Plain of 6 Glaciers (our first hike was Sentinel Pass). Both hikes are located in the Lake Louise area and I feel like maybe I should have branched out a little more, but they were both so incredibly scenic it’s hard to regret.

As I explained in my last post, with Lake Louise being so popular, it’s best to get there early if you want to be assured parking. I’ve heard the lot generally fills up by 8am, but I think that’s only on weekends because there was still lots of space when we got there at 8am on a Thursday. The Plain of 6 Glaciers starts right at the lake and hikes the length of the lake and up into the backcountry. I’d been to Lake Louise once before as a teenager with my parents and the lake was just as scenic as I remembered, but there were so many people so we didn’t want to linger.

There are tons of trails from the lake; you can hike up immediately to the Big Agnes Teahouse and a ton of hiking options, or you can hike up the near side of the lake to some viewpoints, but of course, we opted to hike towards the back of the lake. Despite the early hour, there were still a lot of people on the lake trail, though the traffic thinned out considerably once we reached the back of the lake. I think a lot of tourists just hike to the back of the lake and then return to the chateau – also on the day we went, there were a lot of climbers, and they all quit at the back of the lake to climb the sheer cliff wall. So we felt much more at home once we left the lake, as beautiful as it was.

The weather was really nice. It was chilly, but the sun was out, so we slowly started ditching layers after leaving the lake. From there the trail is mostly uphill and continues through the woods and then into what I like to call the barren alpine. The entire valley was once covered in glaciers, so there’s not a whole lot growing there and it’s mostly rock left behind from the glaciers. There are beautiful views looking back at the lake as you ascend, as well as equally beautiful views looking ahead at the glaciers. It’s hard to count them to confirm if there actually are 6 glaciers, but they’re each slowly revealed to you as you hike up the valley.

My favourite part of the hike is that there’s a cute little tea house located about a kilometre before the viewpoint. There’s a flatish area and they’ve constructed the teahouse and put some picnic tables along the river. We hadn’t really planned ahead properly for the teahouse because I thought I’d read somewhere that it was closed because of Covid, but it was open and fortunately Seth had $20 cash on hand. So we each had a cup of tea and shared a delicious jammy scone. We were thrilled to discover all the teas are from Banff Tea Co, which we had visited the day before, so me and Emily both had the “Plain of 6 Glaciers” tea in honour of the occasion. It’s an herbal tea with a little bit of mint and it was very yummy!

The weather started to change a bit while we were enjoying our teas. It had clouded in and while it wasn’t raining, the sky was starting to look a little foreboding, so we decided to continue on. It’s just 1 more kilometre, the last part of which goes along the ridgeline and reveals the final glacier right at the back of the valley. It’s not really obvious where the trail ends, eventually it comes to a scree slope and I think you can continue on a little further, but we opted to stop there for our lunch. It did start to drizzle a little as we were eating, but nothing too bad. It just made us glad we had left early again because the weather did get worse and the crowds got larger, but for the most part we had enjoyed a scenic and empty hike up to the top.

The rain picked up on the way down, making it colder, and the clouds quickly moved in to obscure some of the glaciers. I always find it amazing how quickly the weather can change in the backcountry and its a good reminder to always be prepared. Fortunately we had our rain jackets and merino wool sweaters, but we saw a lot of hikers coming up looking pretty wet and ill-prepared.

We beelined down the trail pretty fast because of the rain and made pretty good time coming down. It rained on and off for the rest of the hike, stopping for periods of time, but often starting up again. You can go back to Lake Louise via a different route that would take you to Agnes Lake and the other hiking trails, but similar to Sentinel Pass, Sadie was tired and we weren’t really interested in exploring too much more in the rain, so we opted to skip it. It was even more busy at the bottom of the lake as it was now mid afternoon, so we hightailed it out of there and back to our campsite to relax for the rest of the day. So overall, I didn’t like the hike as much as Sentinel Pass, but still very beautiful and I’d definitely go back and explore some of the many other hiking options in the area!