Here are the pictures from our second day in the Rockies, and my description of it. Again, the text should pretty much go along with the pictures. The first 156 (!) pictures are from the Lake O’Hara region where we hiked up to Lake Oesa and down again, then there are 10 of Lake Louise and 20 of Moraine Lake.

[tags]rockies, lake o’hara, lake oesa, yoho national park, lake louise, moraine lake[/tags]

I’ve upgraded to a Flickr Pro account so that I could upload all the pictures from the trip. Obviously I won’t bother posting some of them (some turned out blurry, and Nellie likes to take pictures of our hotel rooms that I’m sure aren’t interesting to anyone else). The sets are broken up into days: you can see pictures from day 1 here. My description of the day is here; the pictures pretty much follow along in sequence.

I had to scale them all down so that uploading wouldn’t take all night. If anyone wants an original version (most were in the 2800 x 1600 range) email me.

[tags]rockies, lake louise, kicking horse river, emerald lake, moraine lake[/tags]

YYC has big cushy easy chairs next to the gates. Nellie and I, having arrived early (natch) have scored two of them and are lounging as I type this.

[tags]calgary airport, comfy chairs[/tags]

We took our time getting out of the Banff Springs this morning, and stopped in Canmore for lunch at a highly-recommended place called Crazyweed Kitchen. Our bellies full of good food we drove east and left the mountains (and one last herd of bighorned sheep) behind. We’ve just now arrived in Calgary and have checked into our sweet-ass room at the Westin. The new tower has nicer rooms, plasma TVs, and so on…we’re considering not leaving between now and tomorrow morning.

[tags]calgary, rockies, canmore, crazyweed[/tags]

Last night on the way down to one of the many restaurants at the hotel, we saw a herd of elk grazing just beyond the door near the river. I guess they’re everywhere, not just on the lawn.

Today was for relaxing. I collected my Globe and Mail from the hotel room doorknob, checked my email and watched a little TV while Nellie slept in. We went out for some (rather unpleasant) breakfast and then drove to Lake Minnewanka. It was raining so we held off on any hikes, but coming around the lake we saw a whole herd (flock?) of big-horned sheep strolling casually along the road. Of course, loads of cars and a bus full of Japanese tourists had stopped to get pictures, as did we. We drew the line at leaving the car to chase them down the road, though, and continued on to Two Jack Lake. It was another very pretty lake, but nothing spectacular.

Then, on the road back into Banff, just a few metres from the Trans-Canada, we saw a coyote in a field. I should clarify that: Nellie saw something, and then had trouble articulating what she saw. I hadn’t actually seen anything yet; I just heard “Bird…bunny…thingy…COYOTE!!” Once I snapped a few pictures and took a quick video I broke up laughing at what she’d yelled.

We decided to zip up Tunnel Mountain and have a look at the few hoodoos just outside of town. There seemed to be a small wedding ceremony happening, but it was soon overrun by more busloads of tourists. We zipped down the other side of the mountain, drove around toward the hotel and took some more pictures of Bow Falls and the Spray River. By then it was raining again so we explored the hotel a little, grabbed some lunch and watched a movie (Clerks 2) to kill some time. Later in the afternoon it cleared up a bit and we drove into town to do some exploring, getting back just in time to catch Montreal’s first game of the season and then head downstairs for dinner and a drink or two.
[tags]banff, rockies, lake minnewanka, coyote[/tags]