Home » Canada » Adventure in North America 2002, Part 5: Canadian Rockies

After leaving Mission we drove towards the Canadian Rocky Mountains, stopping at interesting places along the way. This was a particularly scenic drive with different landscapes and mountain formations all the time. We used the town of Golden as a base for exploring the area, visiting the wonderful Lake Louise and the even better Moraine Lake.

Adventure in North America 2002, Part 5: Canadian Rockies

Jan Arild Teland
2006-05-14 15:53:07

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July 29, Monday

Again we rose at 0800 and had bread for breakfast. John had suggested an itinerary through Canada for us and we were planning to stick to that. We packed our stuff in the car, said goodbye to John and started driving towards Hope.

On arriving in Hope, Tor and Kirsten had a coffee at a cafe there and then we walked down the main street. An interesting thing about Hope was an abundance of wooden sculptures on every street corner. It really was a very nice way to decorate the town.

Continuing further along, we found ourselves driving through a valley with pinetree covered mountains on both side. It was cloudy and rather cool outside today, in fact it hadn't been really hot after we arrived in Seattle. Anyway, the Sylvester Stallone movie "First blood" was apparently filmed in this area, which didn't surprise me as the scenery seemed to recreate some of the atmosphere from that movie.

We stopped for a lunch at a restaurant in a tiny little town. I had a Caesar salad. On continuing we arrived at near an old suspension bridge across the canyon. We walked down there and across it with some nice views of the scenery.

Further on we stopped at a place called Hell's gate. Here there was a cable car going across the canyon to the other side, on which a restaurant and various shops were located. They also had a souvenir shop and ice cream shop on our side, but if you tried to buy anything you were told that you would get a much better deal on the other side! Obviously they wanted people to buy the rather expensive cable car ride at 11$. Well, we decided to ride the cable car despite it being severely overpriced. After browsing the souvenir shops and buying an ice cream there, we returned and continued towards the north.

The scenery now started to change character, with less and less pinetrees, and it wasn't long before the mountains were almost completely bare. ...