Trip to Banff/Jasper: Day 3

Sunday we were up and ready to head into Banff National Park. A few hours later and we were in. Just after getting into the park, we stopped to look at a river and found Mr. Big Horn Sheep. We were standing at the bottom of a rocky hill, and he was at the top. Looked pretty cool. He started coming down, and it seemed he was looking right at us. Kevin said I should offer him some of the Slurpee we had.

Mr. Big Horn Sheep kept looking at us, and then began running down. I (A) was wondering if he was going to come flying down and ram me! Instead he ran on down and then across the road and on the sidewalk around the corner until he could kind of run up another hill. I think he was just scared because there were too many people around in his land suddenly.

Scenery began to slowly change from dry and arid, to rivers and mountains. Large, rocky mountains.

(REAL mountains i.e. jagged peaks, snow all year, over 5,000 ft - hooray!)

We continued on up the road and made it to Lake Louise, but there were something like 10 million people there, and we didn't even bother to try to find a parking spot. We headed back a couple miles to Moraine Lake. It is so beautiful! The water is amazingly blue/green.

There is a trail from Moraine Lake to Consolation Lake. It's around 4-5 miles round trip. Consolation lake is very pretty too, but very rocky (large rocks) around the edge we end up on.

After our hike to Consolation Lake, we headed back to Lake Louise, as it was 3+ hours later and way less people there. The Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise is super fancy. We were a bit grungy from hiking, camping and no shower for 2 days, so didn't go inside. Someday we'll go back and check it out though, plus hike around the lake and go to the Tea Hut on the other end.

We ended up back down the hill camping at Lake Louise Campground. Was a nice campground, and had showers, which we enjoyed (although they are on one end of the cg and we were camped on the opposite end, so to walk there was about a half mile or something way too long to walk!).