Lake Louise and Hiking the Teahouse Challenge | Ep. 45

Well, we did it. Teahouse Challenge is Complete and we are all better off for it. In today’s episode we cover:

• The parking problem at National Parks
• The closest campgrounds to Lake Louise
• How the Chateau is the nicest hotel you’ll never see (maybe)
• Why Lake Louise is SO turquoise
• Who Lake Louise is named after
• the Lake Agnes Tea House
• the Plain of Six Glaciers Teahouse
• What the Teahouse challenge is
• Our two favourite tips and tools for this trek
• Everything you wanted to know about alpine outhouses

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Transcript

Melina (5s): Hello, fellow RV years. This is Melina and I’m Dan, and this is episode 45 of the RV Canucks podcast. We’re just a family of four Canadians who like to travel far on our vacations from work. And we take you along for the ride. If you’re new to the show, you can expect stories of life on the road, travel tips, and trip reviews to help you get your next trip started. Follow us on Instagram or Facebook at RV connects. That’s RVC a N U C K S for all the latest. And please consider leaving a review on apple podcasts or Facebook. It makes us feel like we’re giving great content and helps other new listeners find us with that said we’re heading into late November. And that means this is the last episode of 2021. Melina (47s): And the last episode of our second season, we take the month of December off to unplug, spend time with family and make sure we don’t run out of content as we only get to travel about half the year because Canada weather sucks sometimes, and we have definitive camping seasons here. I would like to take this time to say a big, big, thank you to everybody who has followed along with us this far two seasons in 45 episodes, I think is a pretty big feat for a podcast. We decided to start on a whim. So we really appreciate that you’re here. Definitely. Dan (1m 20s): You told me the other day that most podcasts quit after seven episodes. Yeah. And I just want to say that analytics has told us that we’re rocking it in Singapore right now, Melina (1m 30s): Which is very, very interesting. So if you’re listening from Singapore welcome. So we’ll likely be revamping some older episodes with some new content, maybe over the holidays. So stay tuned and you can stay up to date. If we drop anything new this week, we’re talking about lake Louise. One of our favorite stops on the RV connects 2021 grand tour. We laughed, we cried, we nursed sore knees and old bones, and we ate great pizza. So let’s dive in and find out what that trip was all about. So lake Louise is located in Banff national park. It’s about 57 kilometers or about 35, 40 minutes from Banff proper. And it’s one of the most photographed locations in the world. Melina (2m 10s): Formerly known as Emerald lake. The body of water was renamed to honor princess Louie’s daughter of queen Victoria and the wife of the Marquess of Lauren, who was the governor general of Canada from 1878 to 1883. And funnily enough, when I was doing research to find out how lake Louise got named, I wonder I had to Google what the difference was between a Marquess and a marquee, and found out that basically just the English, like to anglicize the version of marquee, it’s basically the same status, the same position, but we all know how England feels about France from time to time in their history. So that’s the only difference if anybody was wondering, that was the tidbit that I learned this week. Lake Louise is a glacier fed lake. Melina (2m 51s): So it’s really, really cold. It only gets up to about four degrees at any point in the year. So definitely no swimming, but it gets its trademark turquoise, Hugh from fine rock dust, which is produced by massive glaciers, rubbing against the bedrock. So this silt stays sort of suspended in the water and it reflects the light from the sun, which produces that kind of Insta famous hashtag no filter colors that both lake Louise and Moraine lake and any of the other glacial lakes in the area are known for. As you know, we stayed in the tunnel mountain trailer court campground within Banff national park and we day trips to lake Louise. So if you want to learn more about BAMF or booking in the national parks or anything else we experienced within the national park itself, getting the passes, et cetera, go back and listen to episode 44, where we explain all of that. Melina (3m 41s): But I do want to mention there are actually two campgrounds within the national park, which are located just four and a half kilometers away from the lake. And only about a kilometer from the village of lake Louise and their Apley called the lake Louise campgrounds. There’s a trailer campground and a tent camp. Dan (3m 58s): So these are both booked in the same way using the national parks booking service. So it’s no different from anywhere else, whether it’s bank for Jasper, your other favorite national park system, the trailer campground accepts larger rigs, only hard sided units. And it has power only and is open year round important to know that they only take proper hard sided RVs and trailers because of bears, elk, wildlife, and all the other assorted kind of concerns that might come along with it. Tenting or soft sided trailers is your way. There’s a tent campground at accepts, you know, soft sided trailers, pop-ups hybrids, that kind of thing. You can camp in there. It has protection all the way around from wildlife, but you kind of close to the railroad tracks. Dan (4m 42s): Yeah. Melina (4m 42s): So you better be a, I guess, a good sleeper cause the train does come by quite frequently in that area, you can also bring a small hearted or hard sided trailer into the tent campground, but it maxes out at 24 feet. So I think between the two campgrounds, there’s just over probably 300 sites between the two of them. The tank campground doesn’t have any power though, but excellent options if you’re going to stay and spend a lot of time in like Louise or like Moraine. And although I would say the amenities in BAMF are a lot broader, there’s a really good reason to kind of stay in lake Louise. And that would be the atrocious parking situation in lake Louise. And the fact that basically you need to be there just after Dawn to find a place to park. Dan (5m 27s): Absolutely. I mean, but I think the point to take away is that there’s lots of different options for you to research over the winter before you get onto that national parks booking service and find yourself a site, but there’s something for everybody. Melina (5m 38s): So let’s talk parking. We arrived at probably 10 after seven and the lower parking lot for like Chateau lake Louise was already full. And I would say the upper parking lot where we were directed was probably already three. Dan (5m 51s): Yeah. So like the big point to note here is that we did exceptionally well as a family because we were still married and we were still talking to each other despite our early departure time. But you know, you really do need to get there early or you’re going to be disappointed and you might lose, I don’t know that you’re going to lose your day, but you’re definitely not going to be able to accomplish everything that you want to. And we were there pretty close after opening. Melina (6m 14s): Yeah. And now the girls weren’t talking to anybody and maybe that was like a positive tick box, but yeah, we did have to get out mighty early and hit the road. We did start seeing signs though on the Parkway, as we were coming in, that would say like, you know, no lake parking go to like head to shuttle lot where they have these shuttle buses that run to and from, but it didn’t really specify which lake. And I’m pretty certain, we ended up pulling into a shuttle lot thinking, okay, well, if we have to take a shuttle, let’s take a shuttle. We haven’t planned this. We sort of had planned to get to the lake Louise parking lot. I kind of think the shot a lot was more directed towards Moraine lake. And we pulled into the shadow lot and we rolled down our window and we talked to the attendant who said, yeah, yeah, trucks go park over there. Melina (6m 58s): Then he’s like, wait, where are you going? And we said, lake Louise. And he goes, oh, well, if you head up, you should still be able to find parking. So I imagine they do kind of a lake Moraine shuttle. And then once lake Louise fills up, then they will start running the shuttle to lake Louise. However, he did mention something about the fact that we did not have a reserved spot on the shuttle. So it was all kind of very confusing. But after that kind of brief interaction, we sort of hightailed it out of there and drove another, you know, five to seven minutes down the road to like Louise. And then that’s when we found the parking spot. Yeah. Dan (7m 28s): I think that they really put a good effort in to try and have shuttle services. And we talked about this on the last episode that they had shuttle services from the campground into bam proper. They try to have a lot of services and they try to communicate a lot of information and there’s road signs that kind of go over top of the highway, but there’s almost so much information that, you know, a seasoned travel can get easily turned down the wrong road or make a wrong decision. My advice is just ask somebody when you pull in, because there’s always somebody everywhere who will answer your questions. And that’s the one thing they do really well is they’re exceptionally friendly. I can’t think of a grumpy person that worked for parks, Canada, that wasn’t willing to help get you pointed in the right direction and send you where you needed to be. Melina (8m 12s): <inaudible>. So we made it to the like now in terms of activities, that area is going to be much the same as anywhere else. You’ve got canoeing, hiking, horseback riding there’s gondolas everywhere at pretty much every major ski hill skiing. Of course in the winter, just basically a lot of like basic outdoor fun. And arguably the Juul of the lake is the famed Chateau lake Louise. However, I was, well, I was really excited to see Chateau lake Louise because I have always dreamed of walking inside it and maybe perhaps staying there one day. However, if you’re going to have a quick peek around, you will be sorely disappointed because well, due to COVID and just capacity restrictions, you cannot enter the hotel unless you have a reservation for dining or you’re a guest staying there. Dan (8m 59s): That’s okay. Cause we have shadow Tracy the trailer. Melina (9m 2s): Yeah. Now that’s okay because you still get a ton of photo ops and like there’s some beautiful things to see if you just kind of wander the hotel grounds outside, which is kind of where you have to start any of the hiking trails anyway. So when we got there, I was actually sort of shocked. And you heard me mentioned kind of the famous turquoise waters, but we, when we arrived, the sun wasn’t yet over the crest of the surrounding mountain peaks. So the water was like kind of lackluster. It was a little bit gray. I mean, we took some beautiful shots because the moon, you could still see the moon in the sky, but the water was like, I was like, huh? Like, does everybody put a filter on this? And clearly it doesn’t because when we were about halfway up the hike, you could turn around and view the lake with the sun on it. Melina (9m 42s): And it is absolutely brilliant. It is just stunning. When we arrived, we decided that we wanted to go for a hike. And that was always the plan. And the plan was that we were going to hike to one of two tea houses, which are located in the mountains behind the Chateau. So there’s actually two tea houses. Our original aim was to visit the closest one and the oldest one, which is the lake Agnes tea house and just see how it went, see how we were feeling and decide what we wanted to do from there. I don’t know if it was like the delicious tea or the freshly baked tea biscuits, or perhaps it was my trademark stubbornness, but we decided to continue on and complete what is known as the tea house challenge. Melina (10m 28s): So by visiting the lake Agnes tea house and the plain of six glaciers tea house before looping back to the Chateau, you complete the tea house challenge. So maybe we’ll go through a little bit of each of the tea houses cause they are kind of neat. And they each have their own sort of vibe to them. Both of them are open June to October. So Canadian Thanksgiving, which is the third Monday in October, each year. And they’re all, they’re both family operated. So the lake Agnes tea house was built in 1901 as a refuge for hikers it’s operated continuously since that time. So for the last 120 years, it’s a 3.6 kilometer hike from the Chateau up a very heavily trafficked switchback trail. Melina (11m 9s): I would say by far, this is the more popular option for people. Now, the elevation gain is about 400 meters or 1300, just over 1300 feet. And it’s rated as a moderate hike, which I would agree with. It takes most people about one to two hours to reach. However, I think it would probably be challenging for like the average day tripper who may not be in the best level of fitness, who isn’t used to hiking or high elevations, or is trying to attempt the hike in flip flops or heeled wedge sandals. Because we saw both of those on our hike, Dan (11m 44s): Going to lake Louise. You’re going to see everything from around the world. You’re going to see people dressed to the nines and you’re going to see people that have their best mountain equipment. Co-op hiking gear on that, or you know, experts in the back country. And so there’s a whole spectrum of people there. And on the walk up to the lake Agnes tea house, there was a whole spectrum of people. There were all different types of body types. There was old people, young people, young kids, there were big families, little groups, young fit and millennials just whippersnappers and get up to the top. So you can get there, like, don’t let that discourage you. I can’t think of a person that couldn’t get up there. Melina (12m 24s): No, I just say that as in, like, it might take you more than the two hours and that’s okay. Like it is doable. There’s lots of stops to take a breath and rest the trail is wide enough that if you need to step off to the side, we stepped off to the side several times to either have water or strip down some of the layers we were wearing as we were making our elevation gain or to let you know, ripped millennials who were literally running past us and have the right of way. So I mean, there’s, you can totally take your time for sure. Dan (12m 51s): Stop and take pictures anyways and enjoy the beauty. It’s not about trying to get there as quick as he can. You do raise a good point that when you show up early in the morning, it’s going to be cool. And I think one of the things that struck me that day is people that overdressed for a cool morning. So it would be well-advised to dress in layers, pair of shorts, underneath jogging pants. If you want stuff that you can kind of take off easily, roll up, get it into a backpack, a light jacket or sweater that you can take on and off. Because I think if I recall correctly, there was kind of times of the day where stuff was going on and off all day long to keep yourself comfortable. So just dress in layers, don’t dress for style. Melina (13m 31s): That’s why the well don’t dress for style. Cause I had to borrow Dan’s pants that day. So as you’ll recall in previous episodes, the girls and I like all forgot pants and we had purchased jeans because we were going horseback riding. However, the rest of my tire was shorts and normally I’m okay in shorts and like a sweater, if it’s going to be cool outside. However, this morning it’s early August by this point. And it was like zero degrees. Like it was freezing when we arrived in the morning and I Know it was like zero degrees and it went up to like 18 or something that day I’m almost positive. Any, in any case, I had my shorts on, but I didn’t have any like hiking pants or any sort of like track pants or whatever. Melina (14m 11s): So I borrowed a spare set of Dan’s and he was very nice to lend them to me in any of the Instagram photos you see of me doing the tea house I’m wearing Dan’s pants and I’m a little bit horrified that they fit me so well, but Dan (14m 22s): Here we are. Yeah. And you know, it’s, you know, bring a hat, have your sunscreen, make sure you got some water to come with the sensible shoes, all those kinds of things. I think you guys all know about right now, Melina (14m 32s): The bear bell, a bear bell is never a bad idea in that part of the country, even on heavily traffic trails, because you will find depending on the time of day, the traffic really ebbs and flows. And particularly when we talk about ascending to the plaintiff’s ex glaciers, that is a far less traveled trail. So there are going to be, especially if you’re in a small group or solo where it’s just you and the trail gets quiet and there are a fair amount of bears in the area. So having a bear bell is never a bad idea. So a couple of things about the lake Agnes trail about halfway up, or maybe just a little further than halfway up, you’re going to hit a spot called mirror lake, which is like this teeny tiny little lake it’s calm as glass and obviously reflects very well. Melina (15m 15s): The peak that rises behind it, there’s a, like a tiny little like beach area around the lake, a couple of spots to sit. So that’s a perfect spot. If you make it that far to take, you know, a break, as long as you need, I could have probably sat there all day. It was absolutely beautiful. I think there’s a couple of informational plaques. That’s where the trail branches off into the beehive, the little beehive in the, and the big beehive trails and the plaintiff’s six glaciers, or you can continue straight onto the lake Agnes tea house. I remember there is a beautiful waterfall, which is just before the tea house itself. And if you remember Ben of our friends, Ben and Janine who talked to us a couple of episodes ago about dinosaur provincial park, they did the same hike as us, a number of weeks before us. Melina (15m 58s): And that was where Ben fell into the waterfall after talking to his kids about watching where they stepped on the trail. So if you ever make it that far, you can think of our friend Ben. So the last push to the tea house itself is a very large set of stairs up to the teahouse proper. I did count it at the time, but I have no idea. I have no recollection now how many stairs there were, but it was enough that I was like, wow, this is a lot of stairs. I’m going to count them. The lake Agnes, he house, as we said is very, very busy. We got up there, I’m going to say around nine 30, it was around that time. And I think we were just kind of hitting like a bit of a slump in business as like the first round of people who made it up there. First thing in the morning, like all the keeners were kind of finished their tea and they were starting to head down. Melina (16m 40s): So we did get a seat on the balcony. There’s a couple of outdoor seating areas, or you can just order takeout. And there’s a bowl, a menu board at the front that basically shows what they have on offer. There’s a variety of teas. There’s coffees. They make the best tea biscuits, freshly baked at the tea house with jam. There was brownies cookies, couple of other refreshments, but a couple of neat things about the tea houses itself. And this goes for both tea houses, is that there’s absolutely no power at these. There’s no power. There’s no running water. So the tea houses are stocked each season by helicopter and the helicopter brings up the propane and it brings up like the million pounds of flour that they must use in a season to create all of the baked goods. Melina (17m 21s): And they use propane ovens and I guess, whatever other supplies, toilet paper, et cetera. And that’s it for the season. The rest of the supplies either get hiked up by the staff who work there and then the garbage gets hiked down by the staff or what they asked you to do. And what we did is they, they ask to give you a bag and they give you a garbage bag. You put your own garbage in it. You tie it to your pack and you hike it back down the mountain. So that’s what we did, but it was a really, really cool, very unique experience knowing that they’ve just been kind of doing the same thing for 120 years. It was still quite chilly, but like a great spot to just stop and take it all in lake Agnes itself was beautiful. Melina (18m 1s): There was a couple who had just gotten married that had hiked up there for their wedding photos, which I thought was pretty cool. The girls enjoyed seeing that, but just a fantastic place to stop. Dan (18m 13s): Maybe just a couple of things here to jump in. If you’re going to make this hike up and I encourage you to, when you have an opportunity to use the washroom, use the washroom. There’s a washroom at the start near the parking lots. And there’s a little washroom at the tea house. There’s no thunder boxes, porta-potties blue rockets, anything else in between. So when you’re going up and you have an opportunity to use the washer, make sure that you use the washer and you make sure that the kids use the washroom now, correct me if I’m wrong, I believe their preferences that you pay with cash as well. And the reason they want you to pay with cash is, you know, for the same reason that everything has to be hiked up, they don’t have great cell service. They don’t have internet there. Dan (18m 53s): You know, they can try and make it work, you know, with a little cube and tapping your card, but they would just prefer that you bring cash up and pay in cash. So listen, if it was me, I put a hundred dollars in your wallet and I’d walk up there and buy your tea, biscuits and tea and paying cash. You know, that thing, we used to have bills and coins and paper, money, that kind of stuff. Go, go try and find some of that. Okay. Melina (19m 16s): Yeah, for sure. As we said before, we decided that we were up for the challenge and we were going to continue on. That was after, I mean, we spent maybe 30 minutes plus another 10 or so to pee and like off we were off again. So to make it to plaintiff’s six glaciers, you sort of continue on, like, you don’t go back down the stairs. There’s another path that you continue on that kind of leads you away from the traffic coming up the stairs. And it’s five kilometers. It’s another five kilometers to the plane of six glaciers T house. And the elevations are, if you go down for quite a bit, and then you end up walking for a kilometer or two along a very pretty level patch, which is just like a really gorgeous glacial, what would you call it? Melina (19m 58s): It’s an Alpine plain. That’s the word I was looking for. So there’s a ton of flora. There’s a ton of fauna, which would change dramatically with the seasons. There’s a great view of the glaciers in the background, the Victoria glacier. So just a, like an absolutely beautiful stunning, stunning hike. One word of warning though, is, you know, the last, you know, three to four kilometers of that hike, the elevation gain is quite rapid. So you gain 500 meters over the last four kilometers, a little less. If you’re coming from the lake Agnes tea house, like that is measured based on if you take that path directly from lake Louise. So we had a little less of that. However, you’re basically going like 125 meters, a kilometer or something in the last part of the hike. Melina (20m 43s): So it is quite high. And the total elevation of the tea house is 588 meters. So that’s about just shy of 2000 feet. I am not going to lie when we were about 200 meters from the plaintiff’s six glaciers tea house. Like I cried, like I had tears in my eyes thinking like, yeah, there’s no way the air is thin up here. I can’t do it. I can’t do it. My legs were going to give out. I was like tired. And the tea house itself is a little more hidden than the like Agnes, once you kind of don’t know when you’re getting to it. But sometimes people coming down and be like, don’t worry. You’re almost there. Like it’s, it’s right around the bend. Dan (21m 16s): Well, nice for them because they’re on their way back down, but you’re right. It is hidden. And it’s not like you can see it from a distance and you can see that distance closing. And so you get excited to get to the tea house and then you get let down as you make a turn or go over a little elevation rise and see that you’re not at the tea house. That there’s another one. And you’re starting to like, when does this ever end? I just want my tea and biscuits. Come on, man. Melina (21m 37s): Yeah. Now when you get there, I mean, golly, is it worth it because it’s, it’s a big, I’m sorry, it’s a bit of a bigger site than the lake Agnes tea house. The tea house is a little bit it’s. The Ts is probably about the same size, but there’s also like bunkies because that one’s so far that staff members stay up there. The number of picnic tables outside the tea house itself was built in 1924 by Swiss guides employed by the Canadian Pacific railway. And it was constructed to house mountaineers on route to Mount Victoria and Mount Lefroy. So today the tea house offers a little bit of a different suite of refreshments than like Agnes, there was sandwiches and soup, which were like both phenomenal. Again, it has no electricity, no running water. Melina (22m 20s): And Dan had mentioned making sure you take the time to go to the washer. I just want to say how thrilled I was about these outhouses. I was so excited about like the ingenuity of these outhouses that I took a photo of it and I did put it on Instagram and it was actually a really pretty photo, but basically they have these like very rudimentary outhouses, but they’re on rails. So the actual, like the entire outhouse slides back and forth, and there was a couple of them, there was almost like a raised platform made out of wood that you would step onto to get into the outhouse. But because they’re just like vaults, when the volts get full, they have to figure it out. They can’t just empty it. There’s no truck coming up there to pump it out. So they actually have, I think, four or five volts underneath each of the outhouses so that when one’s full, they like roll it forward or roll it back to a vault that is empty or empty. Melina (23m 10s): Or although I’ve meant to ask somebody when we were there, like how do they actually get it out? Or is it composting or like what happens? But I’m interested. I’m interested. It’s just, it, it’s a really cool, really ingenious way to handle, you know, everybody’s doing their business. So I think it’s pretty cool. So from the plane of six glaciers, you will spy mounts Lefroy temple and Huber as well as kind of the crown Juul, which is Mount Victoria. The north summit of Mount Victoria is actually 11,000 feet and it’s a super challenging hike for mountaineers. Interestingly, I found out that it is also the most photographed mountain in the world, which I thought was really interesting, but then it kind of makes sense. Melina (23m 55s): Cause that’s the mountain you see in the background of any picture of lake Louise, which is probably the most photograph one of the most photographed lakes. For sure. I also discovered there is a trail from plaintiff’s six glaciers up to the top or the summit of Mount Victoria. However, everybody says, do not take that one. There is another trail that goes up the opposite side, which is a whole lot safer. And I will explain why. So nestled between Mount LaCroix and Mount Victoria, there happens to be a path called the Abbott pass, which straddles the continental divide. There’s also a very small stone hut there, which was built as a hiker’s refuge. Melina (24m 36s): And the past is named after Phillip Stanley Abbott, who became the first mountaineering fatality in all of north America. After he fell in an attempt to make the first descent of Mount Lefroy in 1896. So the hut was originally built in 1922, by those same Swiss guides. And much of the construction material was actually carried from lake Louise on horseback, across the Victoria glacier. And it was winced on or carried on the guides backs up the past. It’s actually a really cool building, but the entire point is that the past between the two mountains is known as the death trap. And the reason it’s known as the death trap is because you tend to get avalanches. And a lot of like ice slides. And while we were there, there was probably three or four times where you could just hear the absolute boom, which, I mean, it was a lot smaller than it sounded, but you could hear these kind of like mini avalanches and mini ice falls as the glacier kind of eroded away. Melina (25m 27s): So that’s the path you have to take if you’re going to summit Mount Victoria from plaintiff’s six glaciers. So I would say don’t attempt unless you know what you’re doing Dan (25m 37s): Cool. A little mini avalanches, like I don’t know that we got a cool look at it, but you could definitely hear it. And it’s really neat to hear the earth doing its business. Melina (25m 45s): Yeah. So overall the tea house challenge is advertised as a minimum five-hour hike. It took us seven and a half hours to complete from start to finish, but that included our stops. So I think we did pretty good. I would rate the second half for sure. As more challenging obviously. And like we talked about, you’re going to have to have sturdy shoes if you’re doing that one, layers, water, all that kind of stuff. Dan (26m 8s): Yeah. Like the day kind of plays out like this. We get everybody up or an early out of the trailer we get where we’re going. We park in the back of the parking lot because it was already filling up. Even though we got there kind of just after opening and we start our walk and we end up at the first tee house at like, what, say 10, 10, 15 in the morning, like 9 30, 9, 30 point being that, you know, we got up there by nine 30 and at nine 30 of the day, you’re not going to call it quit. So we decided to push onto the second one. And then that’s when it kind of chewed up our time. Right. We get up to the second one, we start to come down, you know, the girls getting all excited, decide to tear off, you know, away from mom and dad. Dan (26m 48s): Cause they’re going to beat us to the bottom, which they did handily. Cause they weren’t going to get beat. Meanwhile, you know, mom and dad are kind of not moving as quick as we started the day, but it was a really, just an awesome day to feel like you accomplished something. Melina (27m 1s): Like I think overall we were done by three 30 or four o’clock. Oh for sure. Yeah. Although I will say going down like hurt so much, I’m not gonna lie. My knees were absolutely on fire on the way down, going up was so much less of a problem, but I will actually mention, we should mention the tool that saved our lives. And that was when we parked, I made Dan go back up to the truck after asking him strategic questions, like two or three times, Hey, aren’t your hiking poles in the truck. You might want to go back and get that. Dan (27m 31s): Let’s talk about how awesome Dan was because Dan just wanted to get started. Like we’re already up there. Let’s like, let’s put our phones in our pockets and stop taking pictures and get rolling. Yeah. But Molina’s right. She suggested heavily that I go back and get these hiking sticks and we have two sets of hiking sticks, not expensive at all. We picked up one set at Costco and we picked up, I picked up the other set on clearance from mountain equipment co-op but both sets were like under $40. Collapsed Melina (27m 58s): Collapsible, really Dan (27m 59s): Super my best investment we ever made. I think right. The girls didn’t need them, but you and I relied on them heavily and probably we could have done the hike without them, but I don’t know that the day after or the day after the day after would have been as good for us. Yeah. Melina (28m 16s): They were super handy tools for sure. A hundred percent. Dan (28m 20s): Yeah. Listen, if you want to go spend some money or bring something, they pack away. So small. In fact, I leave a set underneath the seat and the truck there all the time and they got used. So a great little tidbit or hint. Melina (28m 32s): Yeah, for sure. So I would say overall the day trip, like we were probably back at our campsite and BAMF just shortly before six. And then we ended up ordering pizza from a hotel in Banff, which was like the best pizza we’d ever had. And I don’t know whether that was the pizza or the fact that we were just exhausted and like ready for pizza and beer, but we had both and it was delicious. So staying in BAMF is, is totally doable to do a day trip to lake Louise. We could probably have turned around and done it again the next day to go to lake Moraine, but we were leaving. So, and again, lake moraines pretty much the same deal. Let go canoeing. I mean, it’s very busy, but there’s like not a huge hotel on the lake. So a lot you can do, but the same sort of glacial fed, you know, lake, you could probably pick one in my opinion, and feel like you had experienced those glacial lake. Dan (29m 17s): Yeah. Between this episode and the last episode where we talked about the town of Banff and we talked about horseback riding and some of the museums like there’s a lot to do in band. And I think that rather than China, jump around campgrounds and get close to the next attraction, it’s probably a pretty good trip to go out there for as much time as you can dedicate to it. We all have different lengths of time set up a home base and use that to jump out and get up to lake Louise or Moraine lake or horseback riding or hundreds of other things that you can possibly do there. And you do it as a, as a home-based setup would be my recommendation. Melina (29m 55s): Agreed. So that’s it. That pretty much wraps up lake Louise look for our first new episode, back at the beginning of 2022, where we will move on to Jasper national park, which was also very, very cool. And that will kick off season three. Dan (30m 10s): Jasper was just awesome. Like I remember the drive up, there’s a couple cool little restaurants, gas type stops like that. Jasper’s really cool. I like Melina (30m 21s): So stay tuned for that folks. Happy holidays. Stay safe, stay warm. And we will catch up with you soon. Bye-bye Dan (30m 29s): Bye-bye