Waterton Lakes National Park

With their 150^th birthday, the Canadian National Park system offered free annual passes to anyone who applied, so we decided to take them up on that. Waterton Lakes is an interesting park. It lies in a valley filled with glacially created lakes, with immense rocky peaks surrounding you in every direction. In the center lies Waterton Townsite, a hub of activity with shops, restaurants and plenty of rooms if you don’t bring your own.

There are thousands of miles of hiking trails in the Park. While we aren’t carrying 25-pound backpacks here, we are pleased that we are at least hitting some of our daily distances we were used to in Spain. The last few days we put on over 10 miles in our various adventures. We had become so out of shape in our idleness while in Minnesota that we weren’t sure how long it would take us to achieve that. Not too long as it turns out.

We witnessed a new record for both the Park and the Park Service. In the summer months in Canada they have Monday national holidays just because. This Monday is what the locals call “August Long Weekend” national holiday. Between that and the free annual passes this year, we witnessed the largest crowds in Waterton Lakes National Park in its entire history. We were heading out of the Park to see a bison herd when we saw the lines of cars waiting to enter – appeared more than a mile long – so we turned around and just stayed in the Park. It turned out that Rangers were at the entrance and had to turn people away who wanted to visit because the roadways and parking areas could not handle the crowds!

Waterfalls were prolific in the Park. We found all the trails to the falls that we could find, and sought out the reward. All in all, I think we managed to hike to 4 different falls, each pretty spectacular on its own, but together was really special!

Deer are everywhere in the Park, roaming the campground sites as well as just nibbling on the lawns in town. Spring must be baby time, because there were lots of Bambi’s running around being carefully protected by their mothers.

We weren’t blessed with any moose, but we did see bears galore. We even saw a bear one morning crossing the car bridge in the campsite that crosses the creek.  We saw mostly black bear, but we also saw one huge brown bear on one of our hikes to Lake Crandell. It just ignored us and foraged among the trees, which was just fine with the Woman.

We got one additional bonus that we thoroughly enjoyed. Unlike Parks in the US, Canadian Parks embrace geocaching. US Parks prohibit the placing of caches, but in Canada, Park Rangers set up their own series of caches and provide a passport to visitors. We managed to find the 5 caches that Park Rangers hid as a special 2017 150-year anniversary hunt. 3 of the 5 caches took us to places we might not have otherwise seen. Each cache had a unique paper punch in it, and when we collected all 5 punches on our passport, we were awarded a wonderful geocoin – bonus!

Talk to you soon!