West Glacier, MT to Waterton Park, AB

Waterton Lakes National Park     Monday July 16th  2001           109 miles     

Waterton Lakes National Park is really an extension of of Glacier National Park, the two combined are known as the peace park, celebrating the longest ungaurded border in the world.

The view driving into the park.

Strange to see the national park signs in different colors and writings, it is just one gets used to all the US park signs being in the same 70s brown and white.

One thing I found strange about the Canadian national parks we visited (3 Waterton, Banff and Jasper) is that they felt more like resort town's in the middle of a park. Where as US Parks, if they ever had towns in them, demphasize the resort aspect and play up on the "park aspects." For example in Sequoia National Park they are even removing many of the lodge buildings. Typically the "resort" aspects of US parks are adjacent to the park, like West Yellowstone or Jackson, whereas in Canada they are smack in the middle of the parks. Anyway we stayed in a nice lodge in the city of Waterton.

It was very windy in Waterton, the lake is very long and it creates some sort of wind tunnel, it was much colder than Glacier National Park.

One of the nice things about the lodge we stayed at was they had a pool, and the kids always wanted to go swimming. We wish we could have stayed at the famous Prince of Wales Hotel, but contented ourselves with a visit.

Both this lodge and the ones in GNP were built by the railroads in the 20's as destinations to attract folks to ride the rails to see the west. The Prince of Wales hotel sits on a bluff and over looks what has to be one of the most beautiful views I have ever seen. Below is the inside of the hotel, the windows over look the lake which you can't really tell from the picture.

But this is what the view is like just on the other side of the glass.

The small "island" thing to the right is the town of Waterton.

Up on the bluff the wind up here is even stronger, it almost blew Sofi over a couple of times.

 

The second day we took a drive up to Cameron Lake. These are Cameron Falls just near the terminus of Cameron River which flows from Cameron Lake.

The lake though small has an amazing bowl at it end, signs strongly encourage you to not hike into this area, as it is a favorite of grizzly bears who feed on the vegetation that grow here. (Apparently Grizzlies eat 80% vegetable matter, no small comfort if they attack you I am sure.).

Along the trail there was a lot of wild life to look at, one of the funny things were these small little ducks, known as Puffer Ducks that dove below the surface of the lake looking for food, but they were too small to really get a photo of.

Here we paused at the end of the trail for a photo.

Next we move up the road to Banff.