Trip to Banff/Jasper: Day 1

We left on Friday morning headed for Whiteswan Provincial Park, British Columbia, Canada. We'd done a little research - this park looked better than others we'd found along the way, and this park had 5 campgrounds, which upped our chances of a campsite over Canada Day weekend. We were planning to stay there Friday-Sunday, so were hoping to find a nice campground with nice sites. We did find a great campground along the river and with fewer people than other campgrounds (we weren't on the lake, so not as popular).

Here's our tent.

Notice the golf club and rocks? The ground was far too hard to get a tent stake in, so Kevin was creative in keeping the tent secured to the ground. The golf clubs were originally brought along to hit rocks, but I think we only ever used them to aid in holding down the tent.

The campground had a road that led to where the old bridge used to cross the river. It was really pretty there. You could climb down to the water level and there were tons of trees, branches, etc that had been washed by the water. Kevin found a cave man stick, which really does look like a cave man club, fatter on one end and all.

Our campsite was nice, however the sun comes up there at 4am or something crazy and unfortunately our site was in the sun in the morning. So by 8am it was roasting. The afternoons were nice though, since we were in the shade and could cool down some. (It was in the low 80s when we were there.)

Friday night our across the way neighbor in a trailer decided he needed to listen to old 80s music with his generator going. That began around 10pm and carried on until 2am. Between the river noise and the generator, we mainly just heard the thump thump thump of the music in our tent, but it was a bit annoying to keep waking up to. Saturday night wasn't as bad, though he did go over to the river and shoot off fireworks around 11:30pm (happy Canada day!).