By my third day in Calgary, I still hadn’t acclimated to the cold and settled on wearing nearly all my layers of clothing before heading out with Nishan for a day at Banff National Park in the Rocky Mountains. But first we stopped at Tim Hortons for a coffee, because Canada.
The highway to Banff is fraught with elk crossing signs, a novelty for this California girl. It was beautiful here and well, California “mountains” basically look like hills to me now.
We headed to Sulphur Mountain, where a gondola took us to the Summit Upper Terminal at over 7,000 feet. I’d never seen so much snow…or mysterious animal paw prints at that. I’m not sure these were exactly Fido’s steps, if you know what I mean.
Once at the top, Nishan and I set to hiking the impeccably well-kept pathways to the historic Sanson’s Peak Meteorological Station, named after Norman Bethune Sanson. Sanson first climbed the mountain on snowshoes in 1896 in order to record weather observations for the Banff area. Kind of like broadcast television meteorologists, amirite?
It was around this time that I started to feel woozy and light-headed (think of it as a wimp’s version of high altitude sickness combined with possible hypothermia), so we took the gondola back down and headed into the super idyllic Banff town. After stopping at a cafe to warm ourselves up, we got back on the road towards Calgary, where we gorged ourselves on sushi for dinner, Alberta style. (Hint: everything is deep-fried and covered in sauce, yet strangely satisfying.)
Oh, Canada.
I got cold just reading about this trip. Was the ride on the gondola scary? The view might be wasted on me because omg heights!
The gondola was mostly beautiful and just a little bit scary. Then again I thankfully don’t have a fear of heights! (Boy was it cold, though.)