Drive to Banff and Lake Louise

July 2013 - Banff Alberta

We returned from Calgary last week so my recent posts have been highlighting that trip.
Weekly Recap

We took the Trans-Canada Highway on our way to Banff and Lake Louise. It is a magnificent drive through the lower Rockies.

Banff is a town within Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada. It is located in Alberta's Rockies along the Trans-Canada Highway, approximately 126 km (78 miles) west of Calgary and 58 km (36 miles) east of Lake Louise. At an elevation of 1,463 m (4,800 ft), Banff is the community with the second highest elevation in Canada after Lake Louise.

It was a rainy (on and off) kind of day. The sun would come out and then the clouds would roll in.

Time for a coffee stop at Tim Horton's the quintessence of the Canadian coffee shop.

These little guys were all over the place. They would pop our of their holes and pose for photos.

Columbian ground squirrels live in underground colonies. They hibernate seven or eight months out of the year in a special hibernation chamber in its burrow. The chamber is sealed off from the rest of the burrow with a plug of dirt. It puts on fat in the summer and stores seeds and bulbs in its hibernation chamber to eat when it wakes up in the spring.

I found the following information on the Parks Canada website.
TRANS-CANADA HIGHWAY TWINNING

Twinning the highway involved upgrading the highway from two lanes to four lanes.

Since the mid-1970s, collisions between vehicles and large mammals on the TCH have been a concern of Parks Canada. Increasing traffic and vehicle collisions with wildlife during the 1980s prompted Parks Canada to upgrade the first 27 km of highway in Banff to four lanes. To reduce the number of wildlife-vehicle collisions, a 2.4 m high ungulate-proof fence was installed along both sides of the twinned highway. To minimize the disruption of wildlife movements, wildlife underpasses were incorporated into the highway design. In the mid-1990s, similar concerns regarding increasing traffic demands and maintaining park ecological integrity prompted Parks Canada to widen an additional 18 km to four lanes, complete with fencing, wildlife underpasses and overpasses.

We were fascinated by these overpasses that were built for the animals to cross safely and also to protect the drivers.

The two 50-m wide wildlife overpasses were the first of this magnitude to be built in North America. Three considerations were taken into account for overpass placement; preferred wildlife crossing points, favorable terrain configuration for engineering and construction considerations, and driver safety requirements. Earth berms were built on the overpasses to reduce disturbance (noise, lights) from highway traffic.

Using Wikipedia I found that:
Lake Louise is a hamlet in Alberta, Canada within Improvement District No. 9 Banff (Banff National Park).

A hamlet?
A hamlet is a type of settlement. The definition of hamlet varies by country. It usually refers to a small settlement in a rural area, or a component of a larger settlement or municipality. Hamlets are typically unincorporated communities.

The hamlet is named for the nearby Lake Louise, which in turn was named after the Princess Louise Caroline Alberta (1848–1939), the fourth daughter of Queen Victoria, and the wife of John Campbell, the 9th Duke of Argyll, who was the Governor General of Canada from 1878 to 1883.
The hamlet was originally called Laggan, and was a station along the Canadian Pacific Railway route. It was built in 1890. The train station building was preserved and moved into Heritage Park in Calgary.

Click here to read about our drive to Lake Louise.

It was absolutely pouring when we arrived so we rushed into the Fairmount Lake Louise Hotel and had lunch.

The Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise is a Fairmont hotel on the eastern shore of Lake Louise, The original hotel was gradually developed at the turn of the 20th century by the Canadian Pacific Railway and was thus "kin" to its predecessors, the Banff Springs Hotel and the Château Frontenac. The original wooden Rattenbury Wing was destroyed by fire on July 3, 1924, and was replaced by the Barott Wing a year later. The Painter Wing, built in 1913, remains the oldest existing part of the hotel. 

The hotel was first conceived by the railway at the end of the 19th century, as a vacation destination to lure moneyed travellers into taking trains and heading west. By the time airplanes and automobiles had displaced the trains, it had gained sufficient renown to have a life of its own.

 When we finished lunch the sun had come out and it was a gorgeous day.  The glaciers at the head of the valley which are the source of Lake Louise's water grind up the limestone into a fine glacial silt known as "rockflour". This flows into the lake and makes it look blue. It IS the most amazing shade of blue. Normally you can see to the bottom of the lake, but due to the heavy flooding the area had received a few weeks earlier it had been churned up.

Onto Banff, before heading back to Calgary.
Banff is a resort town in the province of Alberta, located within Banff National Park. The peaks of Mt. Rundle and Mt. Cascade, part of the Rocky Mountains, dominate its skyline. On Banff Avenue, the main thoroughfare, boutiques and restaurants mix with château-style hotels and souvenir shops. The surrounding 6,500 square kilometres of parkland are home to wildlife including elk and grizzly bears.

The Fairmont Banff Springs was formerly and commonly known as the Banff Springs Hotel.  The entire town, including the hotel, is situated in Banff National Park, a national park managed by Parks Canada. At an elevation of 1,414 metres (4,640 ft) above sea level, the hotel overlooks a valley towards Mount Rundle, both of which are situated within the Rocky Mountain mountain range.

Opened in 1888 by the Canadian Pacific Railway, it is one of the earliest of Canada's grand railway hotels. The original five-storey wooden hotel was designed by Bruce Price and was able to accommodate 280 guests. With expansions, the original structure became the North Wing, which was eventually destroyed by fire in April 1926.

The present hotel property is made up of several buildings, of which the main hotel consists of a 1914 eleven-storey center tower designed by Walter S. Painter, and a 1927 North Wing and a 1928 South Wing designed by John Orrock which were built on either side of the Center Tower. On 24 June 1988, the hotel buildings were designated as a National Historic Site of Canada.

Titled "North West Mounted Patrol" by artist Harry O'Hanlon, the sculpture depicts a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) riding a horse in full uniform.

This bronze statue depicts Sir William Cornelius Van Horne, a key figure in the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

The sculpture was created by artist Jeff Knetchel and unveiled in 2005.

Tourists taking pictures of the Columbian ground squirrel.

Town