We’re in Golden, BC at the moment so that we can visit several Canadian National Parks in the Canadian Rockies. There’s been a lot of smoke as there are wildfires burning all over the region. But we’ve taken drives to see the sights anyway.

On the Saturday that was part of the Labor Day weekend (it’s celebrated in Canada as well as the U.S.) we drove through the Yoho National Park and into the Banff National Park. It was fairly busy, so busy in fact that we couldn’t find parking at a couple of stops we wanted to make. We’ll do another drive into this area when the weekend is over.

But, in spite of the busy weekend and smoke in the air we were very impressed by the Yoho and Banff National Parks. Beautiful country! Definitely part of the Rocky Mountain chain, the mountains were incredible! One difference between these Rockies and the Colorado Rockies is that in Colorado the drive goes up and along the very top of the range (at about 14,000 ft) while in the Canadian Rockies the drive goes through the range but not to the top. So the views were quite different. We saw several very large glaciers from the road and we know there are many, many more that cannot be seen from the road. We noticed that many of the glaciers are much larger than glaciers we saw in the Glacier National Park in Montana.

The road, by the way, is Route 1, the TransCanada Highway that bisects the entire country!

We drove from Golden, BC to the town of Banff, Alberta and back home again. We saw different views coming and going so it was well worth the double time to drive both ways. Banff, Alberta is a small resort town that seems almost exlusively built for winter sports. It had a real Alpine feel to it.

We also stopped at the Takakkaw Falls (see separate post here) which was magnificent even in September because it’s fed from a glacier. We wanted to stop at two lakes, Emerald Lake and Lake Louise, but there was no parking so we’ll do that on a separate drive.

Here are pictures we took: