Banff to Golden

From Banff via Trans Canada Highway 1 through the Kicking Horse Passage and the Spiral Tunnels, a short but very  beautiful stop at Emerald Lake and the Natural Bridge, then through the amazing new highway outside of Golden, and then it was time for a canoe experience with http://www.wetlandsadventures.com/ e on the Columbia River with .
Stayed at an exquisite Bed and Brekafast in Golden. with a view towards the Percell and Rocky Mountains.

 

Video with the train inSpiral Tunnels.

 

Banff with Road Scholars

We have had some fantastic days in Banff. Two days with the Road Scholars experiencing their tour.
http://www.roadscholar.org/n/program/dailySchedule.aspx?dID=1-64VT9R
Sulphur Mountain, the Bow Falls, Whyte Museum, Lake Louise, Johnston Canyon, the Hoodoos, A great experience. Svend and I vistetd the Banff Springs on the free afternoon.
If you click on the pictures, you will see a map of where the pictures were taken.

Click here if you can not see the slide show.

Roadtrip Banff RS Canmore Golden

Hillcrest til Kananaskis

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cowboy Trail, Kananaskis, Rockys

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cowboy Trail, Bar-U Ranch

A great Bed and Breakfast just north of Waterton Lakes Park,

www.cornermountaininn.com

With excellent and beautiful and healthy food 

And an excellent informative and kind host
and a wonderful dog Gracie. 

 

I will never stop admiring these circles
that are dropped on the landscape
the fields that are cut and brushed
so clean, sharp,
with these round mounds.

The layers of colour on the prairies.

The contrast to the mountains - and look - there are elks
in the bottom right corner.

A new ranch

The Old Bar-U Ranch - a great museum.
http://www.pc.gc.ca/lhn-nhs/ab/baru/natcul.aspx

 

 

 

The saddelmaker - I would love to play with those tools!

 

 

 

 

I wonder if my greatgrandparents used that kind of machine,
and lived in houses like these?

And ate at tables like these?

En fantastisk dag på vandretur i Waterton Park.
Sikke en gave.
Svend lod mig gå forrest, så jeg ikke skulle stresses af hans fantastiske gods form.
Han er bare stærk, min mand.
We were  up in the high country. Amazing
We are VERY proud,
If you can't see the slide show, click on here to see the pictures: https://picasaweb.google.com/105176717760223309961/CarthwellSummitLake?authuser=0&feat=directlink

Frank Slide, Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump, Waterton National Park

After very filling Breakfast at the Hillcrest Bed and Breakfast, we headed to The Frank Slide Interpretative Center to see the Frank Slide – a slide of a mountain in the Crowsnest Pass, on the boundary between Alberta and BC.

The museum was fascinating, showing the geology of the mountains, the folding mountains, the fault mountains and the “sliding” mountains, and then there was some mountains, like the Frank Slide, that both were folded and sliding, and then eroding, causing openings in the earth’s crust. The cracks fill with water and then  that becomes ice – and then …….

First Nations People called this the mountain of movement, and they never camped under it. The white man maybe never heard these stories, and probably would never have listed to them anyways.

So the 29^th April 1903, at 4 in the morning, the crack opened. The town of Frank (600 people) was partially wiped away.  Two kilometers of the road  was buried. Two kilometers of the railway was buried.  With 300 meters of rocks. 90+ people were buried. Families were buried, siblings, husbands, wives, children, animals  were buried.

A beautiful, interactive museum, with walkways, views, exhibitions. Two movies, one about the slide and the destruction of the town and people. The other of the lives, and working conditions in the coal mines. They but when they got here their lives were struggles. were promised work – go west young men, take your families, Sometimes they never hit the coal – then you got no money.

No bears yet – only a gopher snake that can pretend to be a rattlesnake.   Dears in the garden this morning. Svend is very disappointed.

We also heard about the Hillcrest Mining accident killing 189 in 1913. I thouhht a very poor cemetery, a memorial that had not much to do with what I think of as the coal mine, the workers. But again - they did not ask us.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And then we drove out of the mountains and onto the plains – saw a bunch of buffaloes (well, Svend said they were, I think that they were cows- or maybe horses?) and then  windmills – thousands of them. Beginning to see the layers of blue mountains, and the flat grassy prairies.

Head Smashed in Buffalo Jump  museum – 1 hour from the Frank Slide.

There was a tme when there were no windmills, and when there was budffalo – bison. There was 40 – 50 million of them before the white man came. The Indians used every part of their body. The bones for tools, the skins for  clothing and tents, the fat for lamps and oil. The white men started capturing them  for fun, or just to use their fur. They would kill them and just let them lie there to die. All the buffalo disappeared. Almost.

But they have been here for so long – not just 5000 years, but for even longer.

They had different methods of killing the buffalo. Spears, hunting them at the water holes where the bison had to come daily. Butthey also used the Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump method.        

dFor some reason there was 1000 yeas it did not get used. NOone knows why. But they would wait until the day was right, the wind, the people, and they would prepare. Sing. Dance. Buld “diving lanes” with were long lanes leading towards the cliff. On each edge, they would build cairns, and put sticks and branches in them. The bison had poor eyesight.

The young runners would sneak up on them, gather them  in the lane that now was lined with people holding huge buffalo hides (the buffaloes had very poor eyesight) so the buffaloes would jstart running after the runner. Who led them to the cliff. Just meters befor the cliff, the runner would jump nto the side. The buffaloes had no way of stopping but poured over the side of the cliff. They fell  all the way to the bottom of the cliff. Maybe 10 meters, or even more. Because tere are so many bones and earth piled up now, that are layers and layers deep.

The buffalo were wounded or died. There were hunters that  killed the ones that were wounded.  

Nw there are only half a million left.

 

And then Waterton - fanatastic!.