Day 9 - Bear Country!

A bit of an exaggeration, perhaps, but today we moved into an area where, if we are going to see bears or any of the larger mammalian wild life, it's going to be here.

We ate breakfast at Denny's in the Sandman Hotel in Lethbridge. My goodness these people eat enormous breakfasts. I'm not talking about "full English breakfast" enormous, I'm talking "full English breakfast with extra eggs, toast, rosti potatoes, coffee with triple sugar triple cream can I get you folks anything else?" enormous. I estimated that, during our 6 day stay in Calgary, I ate 14 eggs in 4 days, before my body caved in and I resorted to cornflakes and toast. But that's by the by.

We then drove west, west, west, on Highway 3, through Fort MacLeod, Pincher Creek and Lundbreck, before turning north on Highway 22. At Longview we turned west again and took Highway 541 which becomes Highway 40, into Kananaskis Country (think how the Americans say "banana", knock off the "b" at the front and replace it with a "k", and add "sskiss" at the end... "Kananaskis"). There was a warning as entered Highway 40 that there would be Bighorn Sheep on the road, and sure enough, round the next bend, there was a group of them. A bit mottley looking it has to be said, and female (without the distinctive big horns of the males), but Bighorn Sheep all the same.

Sandra was driving at this point - she took over today for a while, first time she's driven this holiday. She did good, too, and it gave me a break. At some point during today's drive we hit the one thousand miles marker. We saw a couple of deer later on too... well, I did, Sandra was concentrating on driving, which apparently doesn't include looking left and right for potential "deer-throwing-themselves-in-front-of-the-car" hazards.

We stopped by a stream for lunch, me panicking all the while that a grizzly might come tearing out of the trees and maul us (I needn't have worried - despite the warnings on the picnic site toilets ("avoid smells, keep the toilet seats down!"), the place was near a relatively busy road, and I doubt any bear would hang around that sort of area). We made sure to take all our leftovers with us, and drove on to Canmore, and our fourth hotel of this holiday, the Rocky Mountain Ski Lodge. It's okay here, and will be our base for the next couple of days as we visit various lakes and mountains in Banff National Park.

Sandra found us a nice French restaurant in town, and we had a good meal there before retiring and planning out the next couple of days.

The Rockies are enormous. We've been driving through them for at least half of our journey today, and that's really only scratching the surface. They're huge, high, contorted, twisted, jagged and seemingly endless. The fact that they stretch from here deep into British Columbia, and down south into New Mexico, a length of over 3,000 miles, is staggering. We have 4 more days in the Rockies; you could spend a lifetime here and still only scratch the surface of what this mountain range has to offer.

Tomorrow - Lake Minnewanka. Stop laughing at the back.