February 12th-17th, 2016
7 cities, 6 days, 2 countries, 1 car.
For our Reading Week break my friend and roommate, Elaine, and I departed on a trip that’d take us across the PNW and into Alberta. Day one we packed an absurd amount of stuff into Elaine’s car and headed down to Seattle. We had to switch cars with her mom so we’d be able to get through the Rockies. From Seattle, we headed to Bellingham where we’d be spending the night with one of Elaine’s friends from high school. We went out and experienced Western Washington University.
The next morning, we were supposed to hike but we were all feeling a bit drained from the night before. Instead, Elaine’s friend brought us around some train tracks and took us to a little area with a view of the bay. And then we were off the our next stop: Kamloops.
I’ve never visited interior BC and it was DUSTY. We grabbed Mexican food and went to see a movie to kill time before meeting up with our friend whose home we’d be staying in. We decided to watch the Revenant. Days before going out and hiking around Banff. Not our smartest move.
The next day was one of my favourites: we drove through the Rocky Mountains. We were super worried about weather and road conditions but we were lucky and only hit a little bit of snow. We kept saying “wow” the entire drive and pulled over more than once to take pictures.
We made it all the way to Calgary to stay with our friend Laura and her boyfriend, both who recently graduated. We backtracked and bit the next day and headed back into Banff bringing Laura along with us. We were so excited to be in Banff, our first stop was to snowshoe around Lake Louise. We rented the snowshoes from Wilson Mountain Sports and headed up to the lake after getting lost a few times.
From the lake we chose another trail to head up towards the tea house. We couldn’t go the entire way due to avalanche risk but we found a frozen lake and some reallyyy deep snow.
Our connection to our next host was a bit more distanced. We were staying with a brother of one of Elaine’s friends. It was really neat! The house was full of a bunch of ski bums. We met an Australian touring Canada and offered him a ride to Calgary the next day.
For our last day in Banff we made it to Johnston Canyon. The hiking was really, really hard because everything was covered in ice. We slide all the way through the canyon a couple of us had falls. But everything covered in snow was worth the difficulty.
The last thing on our itinerary was hiking up Tunnel Mountain. The ice was even worse on this trail and going up the mountain I literally had to crawl on my hands and knees during parts. I really wasn’t sure if I’d make it but the view at the top of Tunnel Mountain looked out over all of the city of Banff.
We hopped back in the car (with the addition of our new Australian friend) and started to head back. Our windshield was pretty dirty from all the mountain driving and the windshield wiper fluid wasn’t working for some reason. We had Laura go out to clean the windshield and to our horror, the Australian friend went inside to buy windshield wiper fluid for us AND he finished cleaning the windows after watching Laura struggle with it. To be fair to Laura, she didn’t have a license so I’m not quite sure why we made her do the windshields.
We spent the night in Calgary again and another friend, Angelia, came to hangout. The next day we were off again to Spokane. The funniest part of the trip was when we re-entered the US, we were in Idaho. Never in my life did I ever think I’d be in Idaho. But there we were. The options for lunch were pretty grim but we managed to find a cute restaurant with excellent customer service.
We stayed in Spokane with more of Elaine’s friends from high school. Clearly Elaine was the important one with all the connections because she found a roof for us to sleep under for every single night of the trip. And after that we finished off the trip stopping in Seattle to switch cars and then Vancouver.