Contents
Overview of the details
Overall, a lot of downhill today. Mistaya Canyon is a beautiful pit-stop, albeit a small hike off the highway (take your valuables) and lock up your bikes.
- Start/End: Day 2— Waterfowl Lakes (campground) to Rampart Creek (campground)
- Route type: one way (northbound)
- Campground: Rampart Creek Campground, Banff National Park (reservable)
- Distance: 33 km
- Elevation: Climbing— 95 m; Descending— 327 m
- First trip: September 2020
- Terrain: Paved highway, decent paved shoulder (usually)
- Notes specific to kids: Suitable for competent riders. This can be a high traffic route (depending on the season) due to tourism. It is hilly (especially for kids) although highway grades.
- Highlights: Mistaya Canyon
Day 2: Journal Entry
When we got ready to go, it felt good to be back on the road again (Dad kept singing the “On the Road Again” song). It was chilly, but it was nice out, we could still see the lake as we biked, it was beautiful. When we were biking, there were hills, but not the kind that you go up, the kind that you go down. It’s easy doing that, but it can be hard too, that early in the trip, I wasn’t that comfortable riding down big hills without much braking.
Our next stop was Mistaya Canyon, which is very cool, and in the French version of the sign, it called the pothole-like things that the water had carved over thousands of years, “marmites de géants” which means “giant’s pots” in English, that’s how I got the idea of “the giant of the Canadian Rockies”. The giant of the Canadian Rockies is a character of my imagination, but he, for me, at least is the cause of stuff like the giant’s pots and rockslides whose rocks look like really big chunks of Himylayan sea salt, he is a very messy giant, because when he fills up his jar of salt, he rests his enormous jar on the ground beneath the pinkish mountain along the Endless Chain Ridge, and steps to the top of that mountain, and starts hammering and hammering and hammering! Some of the rocks roll into the jar, but most of them don’t. *There is actually a pink rockslide along the highway!
We had a lunch break at a not-official-yet-beautiful viewpiont, it turns out that the real one was about 5 minutes away, but I’m glad we stopped there anyway, because we saw a beautiful burnt down forest that looked as if it had been burnt by Parks because of how we saw that there was a remarkably suspiciously strait line on the edge of where all the trees all the trees were green instead of grey, there was also a braided river, which was pretty cool.
Dad talked about David Thompson a lot, he said that it was part of my education, which I guess is true. It was a whole 5 days of history, physical education, and geography. We saw the Sarbach Glacier too. When we got to the campground kiosk, we met a nice woman who was a Parks person, and we talked a lot, just sitting there at the kiosk. When we got to the campground, we saw her again when she was driving through the campground. We went down to the North Saskatchewan River, which was the river that was at the campground. I made some art with the pencils that I had brought, I also used natural materials like bear berries and flower petals.
Other days in this trip
Other family-friendly bike trips in the region
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