Alberta offers abundance of out of the ordinary adventures
As it turned out, Num Ti Jah Lodge was only a part of our winter trip to Alberta.
Our plan was to steer clear of the usual stuff, meaning downhill skiing. So we wound up riding snow bikes, mushing a dog team, looking for wildlife and watching shooting stars.
Among our mini-adventures:
Snowbikes: You do this at Sunshine Village ski resort midway between Banff and Jasper. The bikes look like those choppers kids used to ride – low, with banana seats and outsize handlebars. There’s a ski in front and one in back and you wear little skis on your feet. You steer with your feet and that handlebar. You brake with your feet (and a lot of prayer).
It’s really not that scary, but it sure seemed so the first half of the first run. “Turn right, turn right,” the instructor kept urging. Not on your life, as we did a series of endless left turns into the hill. But eventually we made that right turn, then a left, then realized we had figured it out.
The learning curve is amazingly fast (helped by the fact that an hour lesson with a special snow bike instructor is mandatory). The feel is like skiing, but not exactly. And it is fun. By the second run, we were swooping and laying the bikes over and having a blast. Our only problem is we ran out of time.
Full-day rental (including instruction and gear) is $41, half-day is $26. Contact Sunshine, www.skibanff.com or toll-free in North America: (877) 542-2633.
Dogsled: We did this near Lake Louise and it is a beautiful way to see the countryside. We were surrounded by pine and spruce with Bosworth Mountain looming before us. The two-hour ride was just far enough for us to get a feel for the trail.
On the way out, we snuggled together in a down sled bag and on the way back, guide Shawna let us try mushing. Running a team is more active than you think. You’re not just riding back there – you’re leaning to guide the sled, stepping on this giant metal claw of a brake to slow the dogs down, bending your knees to absorb the bumps and sometimes hopping a bit to re-center the sled on the trail.
The dogs clearly loved it. They yipped and howled and actually seemed to grin at one point.
The two-hour, 11-mile trip is $230 per sled (able to hold two adults and a small child). Contact Kingmik Dogsled Tours, www.kingmikdogsledtours.com or (403) 763-8887.
Wildlife tour: Well, nah, we didn’t see any wildlife (unless you count the deer on the road), but boy did we learn about it, and the rest of Banff.
For instance, the 300 elk who hang around Banff shed their antlers every year but the reason you don’t see piles of antlers everywhere is they get eaten. Fast.
“Antlers are full of minerals and vitamins,” said guide Rose Maunder. “It’s like winning the lottery for the lucky critter that finds one.”
And if you see a park warden running around town with a plastic bag tied to the end of a hockey stick, he’s not gone daft. He’s just scaring the elk away. Elk would come into town but wolves wouldn’t. So the wolves were starving. Now the elk stay out and the wolves are, frankly, better fed.
Banff was built for tourism. That was the plan from the start. The town was created to help support the railroad. And the railroad was built – honest – to keep Vancouver and the rest of western Canada from defecting to the U.S. So Banff was laid out to face the picturesque mountains and all the streets are named after wildlife.
To this day, you can’t live here unless you work here. Plus, the town no longer builds fences around parks, the airport and whatever. But there are fences to keep animals off Canada Highway 1. And there are special wildlife underpasses and overpasses so the animals can cross the road. (Yes, they really do use them.)
After driving to various viewpoints and visiting two very pretty local lakes, we took a brief tour of Cave and Basin – the site of Banff’s original hot spring, now closed to swimming to protect a very rare and extremely tiny snail.
The original spring is dark but beautiful. And if you bend down and look hard, you can actually see the snails. But if you want to swim, you have to go to Upper Springs where (among other things) you can rent period bathing costumes and pretend you’re a tourist from 1940.
The morning wildlife tour costs $45 for adults, $25 for kids. The company offers several other tours including snowmobiling, dogsledding, snowshoeing and ice walks down two local canyons. Contact Discover Banff Tours at www.banfftours.com or toll-free (877) 565-9372.
Night activities: The seriously neat thing is you don’t have to be staying at one of the fancy hotels to do any of this. Anyone can sign up to join Bruce Bembridge, Chateau Lake Louise’s chief guide, for a bit of stargazing. And so we did.
Nights on Lake Louise, especially when the moon is full, are truly special. The snow on surrounding mountains picks up the moonlight and turns an ethereal silver, bright enough to read by. You can see every rockband and snowy ridgeline as they shimmer and glow.
And yet, you also can see the stars – Orion’s belt to your left, the slightly oval shape of Saturn, the W of Cassiopeia and, hanging over the hotel, the Big Dipper – along with the moon, which is big and bright enough to make out individual craters.
Over at Sunshine Village (they’ll send a bus to Banff for you) there’s the Thursday evening Sundowner with live entertainment after the lifts close, then tobogganing and dinner.
And a couple of companies have night hikes. The one with Discover Banff goes to a historic bridge over Stewart Canyon where you can hear the ice crack and, on moonlit nights, actually see the canyon. Then it’s off to a campfire, with marshmallows and hot chocolate.
– Yvette Cardozo and Bill Hirsch