The September weather had been wonderful during our stay in Lake Louise just as it had been in Jasper. The days were sunny and in the 2 to 7 degree range. The nights were, of course, colder generally staying in the upper negatives just below freezing. And then it happened.
I woke up sometime in the middle of the night with a sense that something was closing in around me. Eventually I pulled my arms and hands out of my warm sleeping bag to feel around so I could see, well feel, whether this sense of claustrophobia was a phantom or not. It wasn’t. I woke up Lea and told her of my sense of dread but she quickly retreated back to dreamland. We would not realise what was actually causing my claustrophobia until we woke up the next morning.
In the morning we unzipped our tent and emerged from it to find that under the weight of wet snow that had fallen during the night the part of the tent I was sleeping under had collapsed. By that time the snow which had fallen after we retired to bed was mostly gone, melted in the renewed sunlight of a new day, and what was left was a wet and slushy mess and so was the tent. After much gnashing of teeth we decided to drive west to Vancouver.
I don’t know how far we got as we headed to Vancouver but on the way west we saw an old hotel or motel on Highway 1 and stopped. We needed to clean up not only our muddy tent from the snow from the night before but thought it would be nice to do something that we hadn’t done for awhile: take a shower in order to clean ourselves up and sleep on nice comfortable beds in warm rooms for a change.
Whether it was the showers, the warmth, or a returned sense of adventure Lea and I decided to return to the Rockies the next day. After getting cleaned up we drove into nearby Golden, British Columbia. Golden was a lovely and "real" small town. The town had initially been built as a settlement at the confluence of the Columbia and Kicking Horse rivers in the Rocky Mountain Trench by the Canadian Pacific Railway which was building a line through the region in the late 19th century. Later it became a lumber camp and a lumber town as did so many smaller settlements in British Columbia during the era. At night the town really did look golden set as it was against a backdrop of magnificent mountains and magnificent colourful skies on all sides.
At that time we were there Golden wasn’t as touristy and as expensive as it is today. We went to one of those inexpensive department stores that one could often find dotted in the city centres of small towns in the West where we prepared ourselves for our return to Rocky Mountain climes. I bought a pair of polypropylene long underwear, which, according to the camping guide sources we relied on, was some of the warmest and dryest long john’s one could buy in preparation for coldish camping and hiking in the mountains.
After eating we returned to the hotel. The next day we decided to do some camping and hiking at Yoho National Park in British Columbia before heading back to Lake Louise and on to Banff. I am glad we did. When we got to Yoho we got a campsite, pitched our tent, and did some hiking.
In the evening we learned that there was a tea house near our public campsite, the Twin Falls Tea House. We went there as night fell and found, to our delight, not only good tea and good food but great conversation. Hikers were there from all over including the United States and from various parts of Europe, most prominently from Germany. Over hot cocoa and tea we exchanged camping stories and gathered expert information on where and what to hike next.
The next day, of course, we hiked. We even hiked up to the twin falls that the tea house was named after. Then we returned to Alberta and headed south for Banff National Park.
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