Salmon Point (Campbell River)

Monday 25th June

This morning we packed up & departed Diane's place to catch the ferry across to Vancouver Island. With a few false starts getting out of Vancouver in 'peak hour' (pretty light traffic by Melbourne standards), we reached Horseshoe Bay ferry terminal with heaps of time.  The ferry is a decent sized car ferry, and very reasonably priced.The trip across takes a couple of hours.

View from the ferry,departing Horseshoe Bay

 Arriving in Nanaimo, we drove north to Campbell River, then back down to Salmon Point about 20mins south.

Wood carving in Campbell River - "Feeding the Family". Quadra Island in the background.

This is a great little spot. We are in a very nice cabin (piked on camping when it started to rain - then it stopped!). Fabulous view over Georgia Strait to the snow capped mountains on the mainland, and an eagle swooping for fish. The wind has dropped, it is 9pm but still light - should be on the water...  (Tomorrow!)

Our little house for the next 2 nights

The view!

Later, on sunset (at 9.30pm)

Preparations

Sunday 24th June

Not much happening today of any excitement though we may go out later. We are getting ready to catch the ferry tomorrow morning to go across to Nanaimo. This morning we swapped cars - initially we had only booked a car to go up in the Rockies but when we looked at what we would be carting around Vancouver Island on buses, planes and water taxis/freighters it started looking a bit logistically difficult.

If we were to paddle more than one area we needed a slight change of plan - go by car instead. So I've booked another car to keep for the rest of the trip and it should give us a bit more freedom as to launch spots. This one is a Ford Escape - not as big and fancy as the Ford Explorer we had before, but a bit smaller.

Festival time in Vancouver

Saturday 23rd June

Not much in the way of kayaking yet, but this blog is starting to look like a food blog, particularly today!

This morning we took the little False Creek Ferry boat across to Granville Island to go to the market. The market has great fesh food - notably fish - salmon is a feature, and berries & cherries. Wild Salmon tonight on the BBQ.

Incredible berries & cherries in the Granville Market

Salmon varieties at Granville Market

Art installation - an Orca in the Granville Island art precinct

Crossing False Creek to Granville Island - kayak class in session

Vancouver is a festival city over summer. We visited the Strawberry Festival around the corner from Diane's place. It is a little community market. Big plate of Strawberry Shortcake for $5.We then went into Robson for the Vancouver Jazz Festival and listened to one of the acts.

Strawberry shortcake at the Strawberry Festival



Back in Vancouver

Friday 22nd June

This was basically a driving day, back down through the hills to Vancouver.

This Big Bear is advertising a fruit stall - one of many in the Okanagan Valley

We stopped for coffee at Manning Park at a small diner. I miss expresso coffee but these diners are very generous with bottomless cups of coffee and this one was a reasonably strong cup. She also had a home-made Bumbleberry Pie which is a mixture of berries and apples. Delicious! Usually served with ice cream but at 10am it felt a bit early.
So we are back in Vancouver for the weekend. There is a bit of organising to do before we go over to Vancouver Island on Monday. We are going over to Granville Island tomorrow and meeting some of Diane’s friends tomorrow night. Shortly we will head down to Cardero’s for their Friday night mussels and beer deal (again!).

Okanagan Valley - Penticton

Thursday 21st June

Time to start heading back towards Vancouver – of course the weather is brilliant today now we are headed back and we can see all the tops of the snowy mountains, inciting a flurry of photographs of areas we have already got photos of. Some impressive icefields are visible around Rogers Pass on the way back towards Revelstoke.

Near Rogers Pass, Glacier National Park

Turning off south from Sicamous we enter the Okanagan Valley. Fruit stalls everywhere – the cherries are good!

We were originally going to stay in Kelowna, but it is a really big town so we pushed on to Penticton. There we found the accommodation on the lakeshore to be pretty busy as there are two festivals starting tomorrow – Peach City Beach Cruise (lots of hot rods) and the Penticton Pacific Northwest Elvis Festival. No sign of the king but apparently he is in the pool a few doors down!

Elvis is in town!

A selection of very nice cars!

Dinner at Salty’s Beachouse Seafood restaurant was good, followed by a stroll along the lakeshore.

Canada Geese, Lake Okanagon

Penticton is the Peach City. Australians are not the only ones to adopt 'Big Things'!

SS Sicamous, formerly a lake ferry

Banff & Radium Hot Springs

Wednesday 20th June

This morning we headed off to Banff for a bit of walking. We checked out the Upper Hot Springs – all the natural springs are set in rectangular pools (easier for cleaning I suppose) rather than natural rock settings. We drove out to Lake Minnewanka to do some of the short walks but it became a bit wet – typical mountain weather! We drove down the Bow River Parkway to Johnson Canyon – by the time we got there it was sunny again. We had lunch and did the walk to the lower falls – catwalk around the edge of this sheer gorge.

Fairmont Banff Chateau

Woodland Caribou beside a walking track in Banff

Johnson Lake, near Banff

Johnson Canyon, near Banff

The highway down to Radium Hot Springs had a number of scenic walks – we did the Marble Canyon walk. This is a boardwalk zig-zagging across this very narrow slot in limestone, with a waterfall at the end. The canyon is up to several metres deep and only a couple metres wide. The water was rushing through, as it has been in all the waterways we have seen.

Falls at the top of Marble Canyon

Radium Springs is a tidy town with very wide streets. It’s claim to fame is the hot springs and bighorn sheep. The sheep hang out at the springs but we have also seen them in town.

Bighorn Sheep, Radium Hot Springs

Radium Hot Springs

The weather is warming up tomorrow and getting finer (of course we start heading back to Vancouver tomorrow!). I writing this sitting outside in the warm evening, at our motel, after bbq dinner & a couple wines.  Nice views of the mountains. Looking forward to getting on the water – up here the water is icy and flowing rather rapidly and shallowly – better suited to a different sort of kayak.

Awesome Scenery – Icefield Parkway and Lake Louise

Tuesday 19th June

Basing ourselves in Field for another day, we drove up the Icefields Parkway to The Columbia Icefield and Athabasca Glacier. The scenery up this 127km road is absolutely awesome! High, sharp black shale mountains capped with snow and ice. Massive cornices that look like they are about to crash down in avalanches. Clear green mountain lakes and rushing rivers and waterfalls that fall from heights shrouded in mist.

Hector Lake - Icefields Parkway

The sun comes out occasionally, but mostly the peaks are cloud covered. At the Athabasca Glacier there is an interpretive centre detailing geological history and geomorphology of the mountains and icefields. There is a big emphasis on climate change and the likelihood that it is human-caused. This appears on many of the interpretive signs. The receding glacier is documented in a series of markers showing where the glacier toe lay at various years. The terminal moraine is resting against the interpretive centre, about a kilometre from its present extent.

Extent of Athabasca Glacier 20 years ago

Athabasca Glacier - climate change message

Athabasca Glacier

Lots of big snowy mountans along the Icefields Parkway

 After lunch we drove back into Lake Louise and did the walks around both the Lake Louise and Moraine Lake. A freezing wind was blowing off the icefield and a few hardy souls were still paddling kayaks and canoes on the lake. The temperature of the water would be a few degrees above freezing!

Chipmunk at Lake Louise

Chateau Lake Louise

Moraine Lake

Yoho National Park - Field

Monday 18th June

Departing Revelstoke we had our first bear encounter – two black bears just after exiting Glacier House. We went and checked out the Revelstoke Dam which is pumping out the water.  

The tops of the mountains are misty but the cloud cleared this afternoon. We have taken huge numbers of photos of snow-capped mountains as we drive up the valleys on the way through Mt Revelstoke and Glacier National parks. We did some of the short walks - a wetland walk called Skunk Cabbage Walk and Giant Cedars Walk (all those potential Greenland paddles in their natural state!) – both very well signposted with interpretive signs. The Hemlock walk was a less interpretive but more accessible. Just before exiting Glacier National Park we did Bear Paw Falls walk on the Connaught Creek which was definitely looking more river-like and the falls were very impressive!

Falls on Connaught Creek, Glacier National Park

We reached the town of Golden at lunchtime and admired their wooden bridge (a project from a few years back) over the Kicking Horse River. From there to Field was a short drive and we took pot-luck with accommodation – Field is 20 minutes from the much more expensive Lake Louise. It is a small community of 200 people – a couple of basic shops, gallery, pub, lodge, but it looks like every second or third house has some sort of homestay. We are in the Canadian Rockies Inn (through the local visitors centre) – a 1br apartment & rollout bed for Diane (from the very comfy couch), and a full kitchen where Neil is whipping up pasta & sauce. Brilliant views up and down the valley – more snow-capped mountains. This is also the gateway to the Burgess Shale – a significant fossil site which also features on the decorative banners in the time (stirs the old geo in me!). We are here for two nights while we visit the icefields and Lake Louise.

Mountain views at Field

Black bear in Revelstoke

Revelstoke

Sunday 17th June

From a fine afternoon yesterday, the rain came in overnight and travelling up the river/lake valleys in this region was quite wet at times. In breaks in the weather the views over Lake Shuswup were spectacular.

Lake Shuswup

In Sicamous we stopped for a break and checked out the boat launching area. The lake had crept up and inundated part of the park. 

A park in Sicamous on the river - guess we won't be sitting here for our morning coffee!

A great idea in Sicamous for boating on the lake

Shortly afterward we encountered a long line of traffic where there had been a delay due to landslips 8km short of Revelstoke (so nearly 70km away). The truckie behind us reported that the slip occurred 14 hours before and he expected only another 20 minutes delay. The café/go-cart facility next to where we stopped had the opportunity to make a killing but didn’t seem quite prepared and about a half hour later we were off again, just as the rain began again. 

Traffic waiting for the road to reopen

It got quite heavy through 3Peaks Gap and we could see the lake rather close to the level of the road. 

Plenty of snow still on Mt Begbie and Mount Revelstoke – the Meadows in the Sky is still closed. We got accommodation at Glacier House Resort - with fabulous views of the glaciers on top of Mt Begbie (except it keeps disappearing into the mist).

Glacier House Resort

Between the snow-melt and rain the Columbia River was running strongly and the Revelstoke dam was releasing water. The Art Gallery was shut so we adjourned to The Last Drop – an English-style pub, to sample the local Mt Begbie Brewing brew (very tasty) – Tall Timber, Knocker Bock and Nasty Habits. The menu here had a variety of burgers and local favourites. Poutain featured – also in burger form. There was also a Mountain Man burger which was 40oz meat pattie with all the trimmings – the idea was to eat it within an hour to get it for free and be entered in the hall of fame – none of us was keen to take up there challenge. The Aussie burger featured beets and pineapple (of course!) but there were quite a few more gourmet options.

Here we are at The Last Drop

Diane enjoying a brew

Kamloops

Saturday 16th June

We got going at a reasonable time and reached the outskirts of Vancouver after about an hour. We are still finding the driving on the right and the signage a bit tricky. A lot of the exits head off over the border to the USA. The weather is misty and drizzly, visibility is poor. 

It is about 355km from Vancouver to Kamloops. We stopped at Merrit for lunch, catching the end of the farmers market. We had a cinnamon pull-apart from a stall selling baked treats by Grandma – she also had perogi and cabbage rolls but we didn’t really have the means to heat them up there properly. Coffee for $1 from another stall (a pretty reasonable filtered coffee, just brewed). 

Scott’s Inn in Kamloops is on the edge of downtown Kamloops. We had a big home-style meal and followed it up with a walk down by the river – the Thompson River is very high. The photo shows historical flood levels (1894 is the high one), but the river is almost at the edge of the banks and has covered part of the walkway.  Kamloops is a railway town – there are historical railway displays and old carriages in the sidings.

Checking out the Thompson River in Kamloops, with historical flood levels on the pillar. The lower one is for 1999.

Vancouver Aquarium

Friday 15th June

Rest day in Vancouver

After a decent sleep-in we hit the outdoor shops to check out the local gear. Then we went for a walk around Coal Harbour and into Stanley Park to the Aquarium. The main attraction here are the Beluga whales but there are also sea otters, penguins and dolphins and some impressive aquarium displays.

Walking back from Stanley Park we dropped into Cardero’s on the harbour to sample the excellent local brews and mussels.

Baby dolphin

Beluga whale

Aquarium anemones & urchins

Sea otter

Jellyfish