The Day I Almost Got Attacked by an Elk

 

In the early hours of the evening Lea and I turned off the Trans-Canada Highway, crossed the Bow River, and entered Banff, which had only become a self-governing town in the early 1990s. We drove through the city centre noticing as we drove that it was “larger” and busier than many of the places we had recently been in our sojourns though the Canadian Rockies. 

After driving through the city centre we went to the campground—it must have been Tunnel Mountain Campground 1 near the Bow River Hoodoos--and picked out a spot to pitch our tent. It turned out to be easier than we thought it might be to find a nice camping spot acceptable to us both—we generally spent a lot of time picking out a camping spot we both liked generally for scenic reasons—because of all the touristy human traffic we saw in Banff town. Most of the tourists—many of whom were Japanese tourists ensconced in what looked like relatively sumptuous busses--in Banff were not, we quickly deduced, living in a tent in September like us.

After we set up camp we headed back to the city centre to the grocery we saw on the way in in order to get some food to eat for our planned four day stay in Banff National Park. The grocery store surprised us in several ways. It was bigger and had a lot more food, including fresh food, to offer than what we had recently been used to and it was “reasonable” in cost compared to what we had recently been used to.

Back at the campsite we started a fire, ate, and went to bed. The next morning we did what we always did; we planned out a daily hike. We had a wonderful book on the best hikes in the Canadian Rockies which had been helping us do this since we entered the Canadian Rockies at Jasper National Park and whose advice we almost always followed. It never let us down in all our journeys. The hike we chose took us through meadows, pine trees, and eventually to the famous Banff Springs Chateau, one of the chateaus built across Canada by the Canadian Pacific Railroad (but now and then owned by an American company, a fitting microcosm for Canada’s client state economic reality) to stimulate tourism—this one near the hot springs of Banff-- and a picture of which always seems to adorn almost every promo for Banff I have ever seen in my life. Like everyone else who comes to Banff, I suppose, we wanted to see the chateau too.

So we started our hike to the chateau. There was no humans on the trial when we began. There were critters, however. Lots of them. Everywhere. As we rounded a curve in the trail we came upon a rather large female elk and her baby calf grazing right next to the trail. We stopped dead in our tracks and contemplated what we should do next. We knew that we did not want to walk right up to the elk. That might prove hazardous to human health we surmised. We wondered whether we should turn back given the counsel we had received many times and what we knew about large animal and small human interactions. After several minutes of discussion we decided that we would take a large arc to our left around the elk so as not to disturb them. 

I went first. I took a wide half circle around the elk mother and her calf and stopped on the trail to wait for Lea. Then Lea started. I noticed almost immediately that the mother elk looked almost quizzically directly at me. Then she started to come at me at a brisk gallop. I had no idea what to do. For some reason I yelled “stop". The elk stopped, gave me another look, and came at me again. Figuring I had nothing to lose I yelled “stop" again. The elk mother stopped and returned to her calf. I had survived injury or death to live another camping and hiking day.

Lea, who had stopped walking her half moon arc when the elk came at me, resumed her half circle walk and met me on the trail. We laughed about what happened and about the absurdity of it all. As we walked on we came across a Banff resident who had grocery sacks in her arms after having hiked to the grocery. She was making her way back home. We told her about the elks on the trail. She immediately turned back.

Happy to have escaped possible injury Lea and I hiked on to the chateau. There we dined in a store behind the chateau surreptitiously on a sumptuous feast of free dried salmon for prospective customers something I still feel a bit guilty about today. Dried salmon—and it was really, really good dried salmon--never tasted better.

Shout out to Monty Python...