Maureen Bush

Skating On Lake Louise

We spent a couple of days in the mountains, reading by a fire, eating good food and exploring. The weather was constantly changing, with sunny, clear skies on one side of the valley while dark clouds settled in stormy and low over mountains on the other side. This morning we skated on Lake Louise while it snowed, the light so flat we started to lose visibility of the ice surface.

Our younger daughter kept us entertained on the road with epic music, from The Lord of the Rings, of course, but lots of other music, too. It was wonderfully fitting for the grandeur of the Rockies.

Maureen

Snow In The Rockies

We drove to Banff to hike and have lunch out (at Coyotes, our favorite). The mountains were stunning, deep in white with every angle emphasized by snow. We watched light play across the mountains, as clouds and mist settled low and then cleared. The snow vanished as we drove home in what seemed more like a September scene, the foothills golden and the clear blue sky huge above us.

Maureen

One More Trip to the Rockies

We were in Jasper this week for a lovely end-of-summer holiday. My husband took these photos, along the Icefields Parkway, and of Patricia Lake early one morning. Visitors to Canada stood with him that morning, marvelling at the beauty of the lake. Then they turned around and found two elk watching with them.

Maureen

Three Bears

Another trip to the Rockies. We saw at least a dozen deer, at different times, a cluster of mountain sheep (accompanied by a serious bear jam and people way too close), and three black bears.

We drove up to Lake Louise for the first time in summer in years. My first glance at the lake left me thinking I could walk across it. Then I remembered it wasn’t frozen. The glacial till that makes it milky also stops the eye from seeing down into the lake – that’s my excuse for imagining it frozen, anyway.

Highway construction is grotesque – stretching for miles and miles (I guess that should be kilometres and kilometres, but that has no flow at all), through the highway twinning project in Banff National Park, to the major roadwork around Golden. This is all desperately needed to make the highways safer, but in the meantime . . . sigh.

We visited a lot of lakes. Our favorite was  . . . oh, maybe I won’t share that. It was delightfully quiet.

Maureen

From Marble Canyon