DAY 165 SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 5 - WILDLIFE TOUR

It was cold all day again with frequent light showers but we had another very good tour.  We waited outside our Aspen Lodge at 8:15am and watched five blue Banff Discovery Tour minibuses go past before Aine (Onya) turned up and welcomed us aboard her bus.  

First stop was the massive Banff Springs Hotel which is made from local small stones and must have taken an army of masons to complete.

The view down the valley explained why this location was chosen at the end of the nineteenth century.  In addition there were sulphur hot springs there which attracted people looking for healing.

Aine drove us back down to the Bow River where we stood on the bank just below the falls, which were running fast.  The first nation people were making bows and arrows here when the river was named, so it was simply called Bow.

Aine told us that this was where the river scenes were shot for the movie "River of No Return", starring Marilyn Monroe and  Robert Mitchum  .  This area is in the National Park and has not changed noticeably since the 1950s.

Next we drove to a lookout on Tunnel Mountain Road where we had another look at the Bow River Valley and the Banff Springs Hotel.

On the way to our next stop we saw a mule deer on the side of the road, but she disappeared down into the bush quite quickly.  

At the next lookout we saw sandstone pillars called Hoodoos.  These normally have a flat top like a hat and were similar to the ones we saw in Turkey near the underground city.  There was a "nutcracker bird" on top of a tree.

From there we went to the Two Jack area named after two of the early men who lived there.  We were looking for wildlife and saw gulls and ducks on the lake.  There was an area with constant surface disturbance which turned out to be  a group of five scuba divers who emerged onto the bank in their thick wetsuits.

While we were there Aine gave us a cup of hot chocolate and a biscuit.  She passed around photos of deer, elk, moose and caribou, telling us the surest way to identify the animals was to look at the colouring on their rear end.  She passed around a beaver skin and let us feel the pelt of a black bear that was found as roadkill.

  She had a horn from a big horn sheep and antlers from a deer and two elks. 

We drove past Lake Minnewanka, which is the largest one in the Canadian Rockies.  It looked good in spite of the rain.

On the way back to town we stopped at Upper Bankhead to look down at the area where people lived and mined coal to feed the steam trains that opened up the area and linked west and east Canada.

We had a voucher to go up in the Gondola at Upper Hot Springs but the weather was so misty all day we chose to give it a miss and stayed in the warm Lodge.