Lake Louise

There are certain beauty spots that I’m conflicted about, where the character of the place is obliterated by the masses of people. Yosemite is one of these; Lake Louise is another. I would have painted it, if only I could have approached it. Even at the end of September, both Lake Louise and Moraine Lake were packed solid with cars and people. Arriving in mid-afternoon, it was impossible to park within a mile of either.

In general, Canadians are polite and friendly people. It seemed a pity to want to mow them down with my car, so I retreated to our hotel.

The next morning, I went up before the crowds returned; it was absolutely freezing, a harbinger of things to come. And that was the end of the Rocky Mountains; from then on, we turned east across the Great Plains provinces.

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In 2016, my daughter Mary and I set off across Alaska and Canada on a Great White North Adventure, which you can read about starting here. We arrived in Anchorage at the beginning of September and got home in mid-October. In between, we visited every province but PEI (been there, done that), and Yukon Territory. In retrospect, it might have made more sense to do this during the summer, since Alaska and Canada threw a mess of strange weather at us.