Canada: Upper Waterton Lake Hike, June 5, 2013

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Once again taking advantage of our Spring Special deal at Bayshore Resort, we enjoyed a hearty buffet breakfast, including lots of fresh fruit and make-your-own waffles. This was an especially good deal, given that a fruit cup alone in the adjacent coffee shop cost $9! Advice for campers or any tourists coming to Waterton Lakes: you might want to stop at Pincher Creek on your way in and stock up on fresh produce, because there's not much available in Waterton.

While digesting we caught up on some work and email. There's no escape! Then we caught the 10:00 boat to Goat's Haunt, the southernmost point in Upper Waterton Lake. Our purpose was to follow the route of the guided International Peace Park Hike that we'd researched online, an eight-mile all-day hike along the lake shore that sounded great to us but which unfortunately does not begin until late June. We received a lot of interesting information on the boat ride, at least, including a history of Waterton/Glacier, the first international peace park, a national park shared by two nations and dedicated to peace.

Let me take an aside here to say that the best hike EVER can be accessed from this boat, too, and that is the Crypt Lake Hike. It is still too snowy to allow the complete hike now, but we were here in late June about 8 years ago and did this hike after reading about it in Newsweek. The boat takes you from the Waterton Marina to a drop-off point and leaves you eight hours to complete the round trip to Crypt Lake. The variety of views, vegetation and difficulty encountered is astonishing. Without completely spoiling the surprise, I'll just say be prepared to go through a tunnel, climb a ladder, walk a narrow ledge,...We're both not fond of heights, so don't be put off. It's a great adventure. It's tough but does not require any special mountain-climbing expertise.

Meanwhile, back on the boat, a Bald Eagle welcomed us to the USA just after we passed the border.We had to bring our passports because we were disembarking in the USA. Easiest customs ever!

We reset the pedometer, which would reach 21,000 steps by the time we got back to our hotel, over 9 miles, I believe. We met only three other couples along the way. This is definitely pre-season. Sadly, mosquitoes made an appearance, although they didn't bother us much if we kept moving. We kept seeing warnings on trail markers telling us to make lots of noise to scare away bears, so when we ran out of things to talk about, Wayne blasted a Boston album from his i-Phone. We felt pretty silly, but it was less annoying than wearing jingle bells or whatever one is supposed to do.

We ate a very light lunch of granola bars and apples on a dock (how convenient) right at the border. The breeze out on the lake helped keep the mosquitoes away, and we had a panoramic view of the snaggle-toothed Citadel Mountain and its snow-topped neighbors.

Continuing on, we crossed a few streams with only minor mishap (one soaked foot) and began to feel the distance adding up. We saw no animals other than a ground squirrel, even after we turned off the music, so that was a little disappointing. Judging from the amount of poop on the trail there are a LOT of moose around, but they were in hiding, apparently. Also disappointing was that the Canadian end of the trail grew increasingly hilly. We figured hiking along the lake shore would be easy, flat walking, but there were certainly ups and downs just when we didn't want them at, say, mile 7 and beyond. Finally the town came into view, with the Prince of Wales towering over it - always an impressive sight. We dragged ourselves over the last mile through town at about 4 pm to a welcome hot shower and lounge chair on the patio. When we could walk again we headed over to the restaurant for more buffalo steak for Wayne and filet mignon for me. More red meat this week than we usually eat in a month!

You'd think we would fall into bed after that, but we are on vacation after all and have to pack as much excitement as we can into every minute, so we were soon off on another evening wildlife expedition, this time to Cameron Lake, having not learned the lesson that all the animals hang out in town. Well, fortunately the drought broke. We soon came across a cinnamon black bear (no, not a grizzly) eating dandelions on the roadside. Further along we found yet another who was considerate enough to walk right past our car. He was so close that we could hear his jaws working. Before the evening was over we had added two snowshoe hares to the list. They first struck us as especially cute and long-whiskered cottontail rabbits, but then they hopped and showed us their big, furry feet which were still white from their winter coats.

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