Bears, bikes, and floods
You may have heard about our frequent evening “planning” meetings as we travel. Since we rarely have a set itinerary we need to make decisions so we know which way to turn out of the campground in the morning.
A planning team meeting.
Yesterday, our carefully laid plans were torn asunder, not once, not twice, not three times, but many times over. Our first and second trail hikes to a mountain lake and waterfall were both abruptly terminated by an annual biking event between Banff and Lake Louise that blocked our access to the trailheads. Being “flexible”, we proceeded to stop #3 where we were turned back by a closure due to the road being washed out from all of the flooding this past spring. Undaunted, we decided on a new hike, which turned out to be behind a “grizzly bear closure”. This closure “for the protection of both people and the bears”, extended to almost all of our potential hiking trails originating from Lake Minnewanka, leaving us with only a shortened 3-kilometer hike (our knowledge of the metric system is improving) along the shoreline, along with the other 3,463,981.6 people (.6 for a pregnant woman you looked to be in her second trimester) who had also re-routed their hikes to the remaining few options. No bear would have stood a chance against that hoard of humanity! Not the wilderness hikes we had envisioned when we set out. But what can you do?
We ended up eating lunch on a sunny rooftop pub in Banff. Beer and local cuisine - a far cry from the beef jerky and gorp we usually eat while hiking. No complaints from this quarter.