Banff National Park | Ep. 44

Today, we review three quick days camping in Banff National Park and the town of Banff.

We’ll talk Parking, food, park entry and campgrounds for RVs as well as tips for making sure you can snag that coveted Parks Canada Booking.

Helpful tips included in this episode:

• Booking a National Park Video
• Best Pizza EVER!
• Banff Ave. Brewing Company
• Banff Trail Riders
• Banff Gondola

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Transcript

Melina (5s): Hello, everybody. Welcome to the RV Canucks podcast. Come travel with our family of four. As we tow our way across north America in our 29 foot travel trailer, our two teenage daughters and our Canadian pride. This is episode 44 as always I’m Melina. And I am joined by my husband, Dan. Hello, and today we are very excited to continue. The very long series of our RV connects 2021 grand tour, where we’ll be talking about Banff national. Dan (38s): So if you’re just joining this episode, this is part of our grand trip from Ontario out to Banff and Jasper. And so we’ve covered off drum Heller in the Badlands. And now we’re going to talk about the part where we made our trip and our visit into Banff Melina (54s): Banff national park is an hour and a half west of Calgary. It is Canada’s first national park. It is the flagship of the national park system. And for good reason, if you’re at all on Instagram, follow us, first of all at RV connects. But if you’re on Instagram, you have seen BAMF and you have seen lake Louise, even if you didn’t know what they were, because you will have seen just absolutely stunning snow-capped mountains, 12 months of the year, you have seen turquoise blue lakes with red canoes on them. That’s like Louise. It is just, it is one of the gems in north America that I think every person likes to see. I think it’s probably the Canadian version of like Yellowstone or, you know, it’s just something really majestic, amazing mountains, amazing town, huge, vibrant outdoors community, fantastic for skiing in the winter. Melina (1m 43s): And it is a massive expansive park. When we talk big, it’s like 6,600 square kilometers. It is a UNESCO world heritage site, and it is definitely worth the visit for every single person in north America and beyond. If you can get to it on this episode, we’ve decided to split up Banff and lake Louise into two episodes because I think they’re both deserving of their own. And I think trying to cram it into one episode would just be way too much. So today we’re just going to deal with strictly staying in BAMF the trailer amenities a little bit about the town and the recreation. And then on next episode, we’re going to talk specifically about lake Louise, like Moraine the tea houses, the tea house challenge, and go through a little bit about the outdoor recreation in that portion of the park. Melina (2m 29s): So before we get into that, I want to detail or remind everybody a little bit about the uniqueness of the national park booking system. It’s a little bit different than you would get in a typical provincial or a state reservation system where typically you have, you know, five months to the day of your reservation. You can go on and book and you make your reservation and it’s timed. And it’s very competitive. The national park reservation system is somewhat similar. However, I think it’s a little more of an equitable system. And we’ve talked about this on the podcast before I also did an Instagram video out about booking it. And I believe I did it in April because that is when reservations open for BAMF. Melina (3m 10s): So what I’m going to do is I’m going to put a link to that specific Instagram video in the show notes, so that if you want the fi like full five minute primer on how to book national parks or some of the tips we had, I will put that there so you can watch it. But one of the things I will say about the reservation system, no matter which national park you’re booking at across Canada, all reservations open on different days. So usually, you know, between January and April, there’ll be a listing on the parks Canada website that tells you when the reservations open, you go on that day and all of the reservations open at 8:00 AM, local time for the park that you want to visit. However, I did discover, and this is kind of my one biggest tip is that a once 8:00 AM local time happens, anybody who’s browsing, the site gets kicked out of the site and you get put into an automatic queue system. Melina (3m 59s): However, I did realize through trial and error booking several national parks this summer is that when it lets you back in from the queue, it spits you out, or it seems to spit you out at the page where you left off, which is really handy. If you happen to be on the camping loop page of the loop that you want to stay in, because it cuts down a whole lot of clicking save some time. And your chances of getting the site that you want go way up. So that would be my one tip is, is go on early and make sure that you’ve done your research enough on the park. That when you get put in the queue, you’re on the page that you want to be on, or that you’re, you know, your top three or five sites are already on. And we did that. And Banff and Jasper national parks are probably the top two national parks in the country. Melina (4m 44s): And we definitely got the spots that we wanted and they were phenomenal. So the other tip that I would say is that you can use multiple devices. So what I did is I had an iPad. I had my iPhone and I had a laptop. And what I did was I put myself on the reservation pages that I wanted to be on and I let the system kick me into the queue. And then all I did was have a look at my three devices, picked the one with the shortest queue because it’s just randomly assigned. And one of the times, you know, my phone I think was at like, you know, 7,000 in line, but the laptop was like 1200. So what I did was I just exited out of the cues because you do want to be a good consumer. Melina (5m 26s): We’re only making one reservation, so you don’t need to sit and hold three cues when somebody else could be let in. So what I did was I just kept the smallest or the shortest queue. And then I, I left the other two queue so that somebody else could get it. So those are, those would be my top two tips. However, if you want to see the full video, I will put the link to that in the show notes. Maybe Dan, you can talk about the other aspect of reserving a national park. And that’s the requirement, not only to have your reservation, but you do also need to purchase a parks, Canada park pass, Dan (5m 58s): Right? So you’re going to pay for, or reserve and then pay for a campsite just like Molina talked about, but you also need a parks pass to get you in. And that’s an annual pass that lets you into the park that park pass you can use throughout the year and think of it like a big day pass. Would you say that that’s a pretty good description of it? So you have a couple options. You can order that in advance and it will get sent to your house and the clock will start ticking. So perhaps you decide, you want to go away in August and you’re trying to be diligent and you’re going to order it. And it comes to your house in June and you’ve got everything set. Your parks pass is good until next June. In our particular case, we knew that we weren’t going to use our parks pass until we got to bam. Dan (6m 39s): So we didn’t order ahead. We actually paid for it at the booth as you enter into the park and paid for it right there. The advantage to us now is that that park pass is good until next August. So the park pass was a real simple purchase. It takes you longer to order a double double in the drive-through, then pick up the past, would you say, and you get your pass and you’re off to the races. Melina (7m 0s): Yeah. And there, there is no additional costs for buying it at the gate. It’s just you purchase it online or you purchase it at the gate. Dan (7m 7s): And the reason you might want to have the longer availability is perhaps it just, you know, it saves costs next year. If you’re going to travel earlier in the season, but chances are that you live somewhere near a national park in your, in your, in your hometown. That’s probably a less smaller, well-known one you can use that pass to get in. And there’s all kinds of great museums and activities, and we’ve even used it since we got it. And so it saved us a lot of money and it’s kind of paid for itself. Would you say Melina (7m 34s): <inaudible> oh, absolutely. A hundred percent. It already has because we used it already in Banff and Jasper. We used it to access the cave and basin national historic site, which we’ll talk about. So it’s already paid for itself, Dan (7m 44s): Great stuff down near Niagara falls, if you were going to camp in this area. So there’s all kinds of places that you can use it. Yeah. Melina (7m 50s): You can use it at any like Fort George, you know, any of those places, there’s a ton of places on the list that it will gain you access to. So it’s going to be a really useful tool for us. And I think we’ll probably just renew it anyway, come August when we, when our time is up, I think. Yep, definitely. So in terms of your RV options, there are a ton of options. Obviously for us, the more preferable way to go is to stay in the national park itself. There’s a ton of private RV parks, which are no doubt, very beautiful. There’s some of them along the bow river, which are fantastic. But as you know, if you follow the show, we do stay at all kinds of parks. We, we love RV parks. We love RV resorts and there’s sort of a time in a place for them. Melina (8m 31s): But I think it was important to us on this trip. I mean, we have a 29 foot trailer, so let’s not kid ourselves. We’re not going back country camping anymore. But I think we wanted to have, you know, a little more of that typical provincial park, national park, rustic feel that being said, there are a couple of options available to you in Banff national park. So you’ve got the tunnel mountain campground, which consists of the tunnel mountain trailer court, the tunnel mountain village one and the tunnel mountain village two, all of them are all right beside each other. There’s really no difference, except you’re probably going to laugh with my next sentence after I’ve just qualified the fact that we wanted a more like realistic camping experience. Melina (9m 12s): However, we chose to stay in the tunnel mountain trailer court, because it is the only one out of the three that has full hookups. And I’m all about the bougie shower in my own trailer when I can get them. Dan (9m 24s): And, and I think the campsites were pretty well laid out. I would say that they’re private in the sense that you can’t hear the conversation in the next campground, and it’s pretty quiet, not private in the sense that you can probably see all the way down the road and you can see what everybody’s outside or inside of their trailer or their RV. Other thing to note is that most of the sites, I guess you would call them a pull through site. They’re they’re parallel to the road. I don’t recall seeing any sites where you actually backed in, do you? Melina (9m 52s): No, they’re all kind of pulling. So the difference between the village campgrounds and the trailer court is that the trailer court was kind of like Dan’s as a pull through, but it was like a very, you know, shallow half Crescent where you would just kind of roll in. And, and it was kind of on a bit of an angle, which was, which was fortunate because we could sort of angle the trailer right towards the mountains, which was fantastic. And then I think the, you know, the village campgrounds on either side of the trailer court are more, it’s almost looks like you don’t parallel parking. Like you’re just kind of pulled up at the side of the road. It’s very odd in that sense, but still, you know, the sites are quite spacious. Just not a lot of trees between them. Not a lot of privacy. Yeah, definitely. Dan (10m 31s): So Melina (10m 32s): We stayed and I’m going to give you the best site number that we have ever stayed at. An if we were to stay there again, I would get the site again, site 1 0 1. And I basically booked this site just based on the photo views that you get when you go onto the parks website and you just start clicking on sites. The reason that I would choose this site is it’s in the very front row. So the rows are parallel to the road, parallel to tunnel mountain, and then they go backwards. So we were kind of in the front row, right at the road, however, the road, which we didn’t find out to my delight until we got there, the road is like graded down a bit. So when you’re sitting in the campground, it looks like it’s you and the mountains, like, unless a car is driving down that road, which isn’t very busy. Melina (11m 20s): It’s almost like you have the mountains all to yourself. It’s like, it’s like your trailer. You’ve got a beautiful field in front of you, which was great for like tossing the ball around and then you’ve got the mountains. So it was the most beautiful spot knowing that you’re in with a bunch of different people that it still felt like with the angle of the trailer, like it was very private. It very beautiful view. First thing in the morning, definitely one of my favorite campsites we’ve ever stayed at. Dan (11m 45s): Yeah. And I would highly recommend that. Not every site has got lots of space for throwing a Frisbee or tossing a ball. So if you’ve got kids that like to burn off some energy, it’s probably a really great area to do that because they can do it not too far from the trailer and you can keep a good eye on them. Melina (12m 0s): <inaudible>. So in terms of location, all of the tunnel mountain campgrounds are located like three, three and a half kilometers from BAMF itself from downtown BAMF, which is not a long ways. You can walk there in about 40 minutes. There’s a couple of trails down the mountain. You can ride a bike. However, make it known that the tunnel mountain trailer court is like pretty much halfway up a mountain. So if you walk down, you have to walk back up. If you ride your bike down, you have to ride back up. And it is a slog like driving down it, the road is very narrow. There is a small bike lane, but it’s almost like a bit of a snaky switchback road, a little bit like quite windy on the way down the mountain. Melina (12m 44s): So Dan (12m 45s): Yeah, I think I’d feel comfortable walking down. I’d feel comfortable walking up. I think though you have to be aware of your surroundings because you are close to the traffic. Not that it’s going fast, but it can get a bit busy. And I think more than once we saw an ambitious group of people spread out, walking their way back. Now, if I remember correctly, there’s also a kind of a shuttle bus service into the town as well. Melina (13m 8s): There’s a shuttle bus service. And when we wrote it, so masks were mandatory for COVID, you know, I don’t know, by next, next summer, what will be happening. And I think it was, it was free one way, but I can’t remember which way it was either like free to get downtown and you paid like $2 or something to get back. It was, it was really, really reasonable anyway, and a really good way to shuttle yourself around with, especially if you have like a motor home where you can’t disconnect, there are services to get you downtown into all the major sites and bam, for Dan (13m 34s): Sure. You’ve got lots of options, Melina (13m 35s): Right across two from the campground areas. There’s a trail called the Hoodoo trail, which is a 6.2 mile loop. It’s pretty easy. It’s a moderate, easy to moderate trail. We did not go on that trail. And when you listen to the next episode, you’ll find out why, because we just opted for a 15 to 18 kilometer hike the next day. And we were only in vamp for three days. So we opted out of the Hoodoo trail, but it is a beautiful trail and it’s a fairly moderate trail, which you can take right from the campground, which is fantastic. I also did discover while we were there and standing there looking at the tunnel mountain lookout and wondering why I couldn’t see a tunnel. And that is because there was supposed to be a tunnel. Melina (14m 18s): Originally. It was proposed to be blasted through the mountain in the late 18 hundreds as part of a CP rail line. And they sort of discovered there was a bit of a blunder in the survey and they discovered they could do it around the mountain and save like a million bucks. And so they did that. So the name just stuck. So there is no tunnel in tunnel mountain. If anybody was wondering, Dan (14m 39s): He didn’t get the benefit from a helicopter shuttling, picnic tables up and down a mountain though, that kind of flew through the valley. So that was kind of cool. Melina (14m 46s): It was, I forgot about that. So downtown, bam, what do we want to say about Dan Kanban? Maybe start, let’s start with like provision. So if you need to go to the grocery store in downtown, BAMF good luck finding parking. Dan (14m 59s): Yeah. So I don’t really think we looked ahead as to what we were going to need to do down there for parking. And so we just kind of figured, well, we’ll drive in, we’ll find the grocery store, we’ll get groceries and we’ll leave. And so there’s a really nice IGA clean, lots of selection. All the checkouts were open. Service was great. There’s no parking down there. We managed to find one place to park in front of it, with the truck that said 15 minutes strictly enforced. And so Molina, Fiona and I all went into the store to go pick out groceries. And at the 14 minute mark, I ran back out to the truck and hopped in the truck. So we wouldn’t be, get in trouble with the 15 minute strictly enforced warning only to have Fiona show up at the truck, five minutes later saying, mom needs your wallet. Dan (15m 43s): You left with all the money to pay for the groceries. So we kinda, we got our groceries and we got out of there, but it was, it was a bit of an ordeal as we kind of drove around the streets, trying to find proper parking. Melina (15m 53s): So maybe share the solution we had to that. Dan (15m 56s): So the solution to that, which we found is that there is ample parking downtown, it’s free at the train station. It basically you drive downtown, you go to the train station, you park in a huge parking lot. And then you can walk into the village, which is three, four blocks. It’s five minute walk, nice and easy flat, no Hills to go up. So that’s really good. And that’s what we did probably three or four times, you’d say. Yep. So, you know, I think that’s the ideal solution because this is actually a really walkable town. I don’t really think you want to be driving your car around it any more than you have to. Melina (16m 29s): No. And part of the downtown core is closed off to traffic. Anyway, it’s just a pedestrian, there’s a small pedestrian block where it’s like patios and foot traffic only. So it does block up the main street a little bit from, from traffic, which means you, you kind of have to drive around if you need to get to certain places. But the train station was phenomenal. There is plenty of RV parking. There, there is no overnight parking and bam like nails down. Like they are, when we say parking strictly enforced, it is strictly enforced, particularly overnighting because they would just have people there trying to stay at the train station every night. But definitely, definitely the best place the washrooms are. Great. They’re clean. The train station itself was pretty neat. It would be. Melina (17m 9s): I’m going to say like twenties, thirties, vintage. Dan (17m 11s): Yeah. It kind of reminds you of the, the heyday, the golden age of railroad tracks. Melina (17m 16s): It actually reminded me of the overlook hotel inside. It gave me a bit of the shining vibe, but I went in there to use the washroom just before the building closed. And I was the only one in there. So it was a little bit creepy to me, but, but it’s about that vintage, like dark wood paneling, all that kind of stuff. In terms of downtown tons of restaurants, you’ll get everything from like chain restaurants, like the keg we ate at the Banff avenue brewing company, which you kind of, can’t miss it’s in this big whistle looking building, you know, like kind of like a Swiss chalet Dan (17m 47s): On it’s on the second floor on the main drag on the main Melina (17m 50s): Drag. And they’re sort of like a Swiss looking balcony, which you can sit and eat and overlook the street, fantastic food, fantastic beer. They brew their own beer. So Banff brewing company and Jasper brewing company both have their own. We chose some of the Jasper’s selections at the beer store to bring back to our campground. I don’t remember what we got, but it was a little heavy for my taste. I preferred the BAMF avenue brewing company, but we did get the beer flight and even like the raspberry beer or whatever we had was like, fantastic. So if you go to the bank avenue brewing company, bring me back some beers, the white whip was amazing and we brought cans of that home and I am very sad that it’s all gone. Dan (18m 31s): Yeah, it’s too bad. We haven’t found a way to get any of it here in Ontario, but that place was really good. Yeah. Melina (18m 36s): Also the wine store, they had this like darling wine store in the basement, like with like six foot ceilings of some store and the best selection of wine I probably have ever seen. And I will look up the name of it to give props to whoever owns it, because it was an awesome wine store, really unique stuff. Like you can tell this guy was like a connoisseur with what he brought in. It’s not your typical like Western wines or BC wines only, or like LCPO quality. Like it was really thoughtfully done where these wines came from across the world. And we got some really amazing pics in that store. Dan (19m 8s): It’s a delightful hole in the wall. That’s not a lot of square footage, but man, have they packed it with some really great stuff that you can try and it’s not too heavy on your wallet. Melina (19m 18s): So speaking of heaviness on wallets, do we want to explain how the souvenir stores work? Dan (19m 23s): Souvenir stores are probably chain owned because it would not be uncommon to go into two or three different souvenir stores and find the same t-shirt or the same key chain or magnet. And I think that you actually bought Aila a sweater or a set of jogging pants. And when they didn’t have her size, they kind of ran out the back door, down the street, grabbed a pair and got the size that you needed. Does that sound right? Melina (19m 45s): Yeah. So she had this pair of sweat pants she wanted to buy and they didn’t ever size. So she ran out the front door, down the street and into the, like the store three tours down, which was like a differently themed itineration of the same souvenir shop, but they’re on either sides of the street and you’re going to see the same mugs, the same, t-shirts the same sweaters and all of them now don’t get me wrong. They’re great. They’re beautiful. Like the girls got some really great hoodies and I love, I love sweat sweatpants. I kind of wished that I got a pair of them, but they’re all kind of owned by the same people. So when you’ve seen like about five, you’ve seen them all and there’s probably two dozen. Dan (20m 16s): Yeah. And you know what, let’s not kid ourselves. Your takeaway here is that you’re probably going to leave with a BAMF t-shirt or a sweater. And so if they don’t have your size in the first store, just ask rather than trying to fight your way down through three different stores. Now, the other thing I’d say about the shopping though, is there’s lots of unique little stores there that aren’t changed. There was a great Western wear store where we had to pick up belts because we forgot to pack belts on the trip and we needed our jeans, but there’s lots of cool little one-off unique stores in the downtown as well. Melina (20m 46s): It is very, it’s a very cool town. It’s very touristy though. And I would say I much preferred the feel of Jasper as a town. Like it just seemed more like chill, more livable, and it would be like the difference between like Venice beach in Southern California and like somewhere like Pismo beach, that’s like a true surfers town where it’s not overly commercialized if you will. Dan (21m 14s): Yep. I think that’s a fair assessment. Yeah. Melina (21m 16s): Downtown BAMF is, you know, a fairly small footprint, a lot to do. I’m also going to look up and put in the show notes and I’m sorry that it just occurred to me. Do you remember how good that pizza was? Oh yeah. That we hadn’t Pam. It was the best piece that I’ve ever had in my life. And I totally just forgot about it until right now. So I’m, it was in a hotel on the end of the bam strip. So I am going to put that in there and make sure you have pizza at this joint. Cassie was amazing. It was amazing. The crust was like the best I’ve ever had. Dan (21m 47s): And we’d had a busy day that day. We’d I don’t know if we had done the hiker, we’d done the horseback riding, but we had, we were hungry that day. It was really good. It saved our family. Melina (21m 57s): So one word of caution. If you go to bam, you’re probably going to want to go across the river and have a look at the Banff Springs hotel, which is very famous. It is very old. It is very beautiful and it is very on a one way street. So do not think that on your way out of town, you’re going to swing by with your trailer in tow or in your motor home to just have a look because you will not be able to turn back around. Not that we did that by experience, we actually went by with the truck without the trailer. So it was fine, but we did note that. Yeah. There’s no way you would be getting in here and turning around in this parking lot if you had a rig attached to you. Yeah. Dan (22m 33s): And I think if at all, you do have to transit the town with your trailer. You’re going to get in and you’re going to get out, but you have to know that traffic is bit as busy in the town. And I think we were not that far from the downtown, but it still took us a good 20 minutes of sitting in traffic just to come back from that for sure. Melina (22m 51s): Yeah, absolutely. Do you want to talk about our horse riding adventure? Dan (22m 55s): We had an excellent horse riding adventure, so it was ILAs birthday and there’s obviously going to be no birthday party. And we gave her a couple options of doing a gondola ride or doing horseback riding. And so she elected to do horseback riding, which was a really great trail ride. Very helpful staff, very friendly horses were nice and tame. It was kind of through the forest and along the river. And I think we just had a great time doing it. I’d definitely do it again. I’d definitely recommend it. Melina (23m 25s): Yeah, absolutely. They have rides one, two and three hours and I think they also do one where you go out and have like a cookout and a picnic and stuff. We stuck to the one hour ride. The girls are not overly familiar with horses. And there was a few of us, even me, like I used to ride horses, but I haven’t been on a horse in like at least 20 years. So, I mean, there was a few of us that are walking like true. When we got off, it’s a bit, bit hard on your joints if you’re not used to it, but you, you just get a really good vantage point of the bow river, which is, which is beautiful and turquoise. And they do a really good job of giving you a lot of history of the area as well. Yeah. Dan (24m 0s): And if you don’t have time to get into the back country, this is probably the thing that gets you closest to nature quickly to get a feel for it. And the staff was really friendly. The guide at the back I chatted with was a lady from Australia and she was just coming to the end of her work term here in Canada. So it’s really interesting people that you’re going to meet. Melina (24m 18s): And I would say, you know, if you know anything about us, we travel very, very far on single trips, but we tend to do trips where we might only be in a specific location for three or four days at a time. So we sort of are very strategic about picking highlights. So we pick highlights, we have our trip where we can kind of fit in some of the big stuff, some of the famous stuff. And then we make our more detailed lists on like, when we want to go back and only do Drumheller, or if we want to only do BAMF, this is where we want to explore more. So a lot of this is going to be like surface level type information, but it’s, that’s the way we kind of figure out what is worth doing again, what areas we want to explore more. Melina (25m 1s): This is going to be like kind of a general overview of Banff. If you haven’t figured that out already, Dan (25m 6s): It is. But I feel, and I said this to you several times when we were out there, I really, really enjoyed it. And I feel like it’s the kind of place you could drive out there and spend a week or seven, six or seven or eight days, and really have lots of cool stuff to explore in depth and not be bored. And I think that’s the sign of going somewhere is that you want to go back to it. Like you left something on the table that you didn’t get to see. So if you’re not the dashing travelers that we are, don’t be afraid to go out there and make a specific trip just to go to Banff and explore it in depth as well. Melina (25m 43s): For sure. And I do want to mention the gondola cause that was the other option we gave Aila for her birthday trip and she chose the horseback riding, which was cool. That was totally fine. But the Banff gondola is a very, well-traveled the elevation at the top of it is like almost 7,500 feet. It takes eight minutes to get to the top up at the top. They have it’s it overlooks Sulphur mountain, which was one of the besides tunnel mountain is one of the two largest peaks in BAMF and they have kind of sunset watch parties. It’s a great place to watch the sunset. They have a couple of bistros restaurants at the top. It is not inexpensive. I think somewhere around the $50 mark, I think for an adult to go up the gondola, but definitely worth it. Melina (26m 26s): But plan on you can, there’s some trails up at the top. You can plan on spending quite a few hours up at the top. And if I remember correctly, it’s time of day pricing, like on weekends, it’s probably $60 middle of the week. It’s about 55 for adults, you know, in terms of children’s pricing though, children’s pricing has half of the adult pricing. So, you know, if it’s $57 up it’s 28 50 for a child. So for a family of four, it, it can be a lot of money, especially if you’re planning on eating dinner up there, but it’s also a great place for a date night just saying it’s, ah, it’s beautiful up there Dan (27m 4s): Noted Melina (27m 6s): For next time. Dan (27m 7s): I think maybe we should talk about climate and this maybe goes back to why we needed to wear our jeans and pick up a belt at the Western store. When we left Ontario, it was like 4,000 degrees Celsius with tons of humidity. And I guess life was busy and we were just kind of assumed that we’d be fine to leave with, with shorts. And we wouldn’t really need too much warm clothing. And while it wasn’t exceptionally cool when we were in BAMF it wasn’t, I wouldn’t say it was cold. I think you’re going to want to bring a light jacket, a sweater, and a pair of long pants. And you’re probably going to have to layer your clothing in such a way that you can dress for the day. Dan (27m 49s): And it might be, you might leave early in the morning and it’s cold and you need a jacket and a sweater and a hat and maybe little ones will want their gloves. And by the afternoon, you’re stripped down to your t-shirt. So I think you need to plan for a range of clothing options relative to the weather. Melina (28m 5s): And I will say we’re not new travelers. I grew up in this part of Canada and I don’t know it was a failure. It’s like every camping trip, you leave home without something. And for us it was clothes, it was warm clothes. So it was just one of those trips. I kind of feel, we were a little bit under the gun to get on the road. We had some stressful stuff happening in our personal lives at that particular time. So it was just like, get everything in the trailer, let’s get on the road. So we do normally plan for this kind of stuff, but yes, it is very much, it’s never going to hit, you know, 40 degrees. And if it does, it’s like for a day, you know, it’s, it’s just not that type of climate. So layers are your friends definitely Dan (28m 43s): Bringing a sensible pair of shoes? Like I wouldn’t be afraid of going to BAMF and you know, if there’s something for all levels of fitness, but everybody’s going to need a sensible pair of shoes. Melina (28m 53s): Yeah. We’ll talk about that. When we talk about lake Louise and the variety of footwear we saw on the hiking Dan (28m 59s): Trails and Dan’s great save. Melina (29m 1s): Yes. We’ll talk about that next episode. So I want to talk a bit about cave and basin national historic site, which I mentioned. So while it is inside the park, which you have already paid admission to get in, it also requires ambition. However, if you have the parks pass, it’s included cave and basin is basically the birthplace of what became Banff national park. And the reason it’s so popular is just because it’s a really neat sulfur spring inside a cave. It’s very smelly. If you’ve ever been to a sulfur spring, it is quite smelly, but it is actually really close to downtown obvious, obvious reasons. Melina (29m 42s): That’s kind of like, like we said, the birthplace of the national parks. So everything was sort of built around that. So Banff avenue is the main street in downtown bath. And if you go down BAMF avenue across the bridge, across the bow river and you turn left, you’re going to hit the hotel. You’re going to hit the am Springs Dan (29m 59s): Hotel. You get, I got Melina (30m 2s): It. The Banff Springs hotel. Thank you. If you go right, you’re going to hit the Cayman basin and the trail riding. So the cave-in basin consists of a number of walking trails. There’s there’s upper Springs and lower Springs, the lower spring, and the cave has been sort of built up. Like you can’t walk into the cave from the outside. You have to enter the interpretive center. There used to be a swimming pool, which was naturally heated from the natural hot Springs that has been sort of, kind of covered over it is still there. And it’s still actually kind of neat to see it sort of at the turn of the last century is when they built it into a bit of a swimming pool, kind of attraction where people would come and not only experienced the cave, but also swim in the natural swimming pools, but they’ve kind of taken what has been the covered over pool. Melina (30m 51s): And they’ve turned it into a bit of an interpretive center. You find out about the cave, there’s interactive exhibits. There’s a great film that plays to show you kind of the natural history of the area and the indigenous peoples and what they use those Springs for in terms of like healing waters, et cetera. There is even some history on the railways that that made their way through. So there’s a lot of great stuff I would say. I mean, it’s not overall a very large site. Like you could probably do it in two to three hours. If you’re sensitive to smells, the sulfur smell can be quite strong at times. And that is also what I mentioned, the bath gondola that goes up sulfur mountain. Melina (31m 33s): Now, you know why sulfur mountain is named sulfur mountain? Oh, I know what I’m going to talk about. There was some crazy snail at the cave and basin. There’s like this there’s like this endangered snail, there’s this endangered snail. That’s like unique to Canada and the warm waters of like warm sulfur waters. And it’s kind of only found in very small numbers. And as you arrive into the interpretive center, there’s a guide standing in sort of a natural pool. And when we pass by, they were pointing at something that was kind of floating on some algae in the water. And these snails are the tiniest things I’ve ever seen. Like they wouldn’t even be, I bet you they’d be about the size of like a pinhead. It was basically classified at risk of extinction somewhere back in the early two thousands. Melina (32m 17s): And the cave and basin site has done just a fantastic job of, of maintaining this population of snails, which is also one of the reasons you are no longer allowed to swim in the spring water. Dan (32m 29s): Yeah. But it was really cool. I think it kind of tied up the end of the day for us. We did it right after the horseback riding. It was like a nice little bow tie on the day, learned a lot about the area and the history, why Banff is the way that it is. So that’s kind of a really cool thing to see. Melina (32m 43s): So other than that, that pretty much wraps up our couple of days in BAMF we’ll probably get packed to, or reference part of some of bam when we talk about lake Louise. But look forward to next episode in two weeks, when we talk about our grand teahouse challenge, Dan saving the day, probably the coldest morning we ever experienced there. And just some of the absolute highlights of my life on this trip to lake Louise. Dan (33m 9s): Yup. Lake Louise was really awesome. That justice just there’s so much to do there. We just can’t put it into one podcast. We will stay tuned. Melina (33m 18s): We’ll see you again in a couple of weeks folks. All right. Dan (33m 20s): Bye. Bye. Bye./