Golden to Calgary.

Wednesday July 13th.

Today we have a lazy start after yesterdays mammoth 11 hour drive.It's about 10.30 before we are load up  and say goodbye to our hosts for the night ,Nancy and John's friends Mellisa and Mike and their delightful little girl, Aziza.

 

They have a lovely Guest House just outside the center of Golden. Mountain Bikers are summer guests and Skiers in the winter.

  

Driving out of Golden back to the Trans Canada Highway I'm struck by how the  rocks on the mountain sides shine golden in the sunlight and wonder if this is how the area got its name.

This is through the car window, but they really do shine yellow and gold when wet.

Our first stop is at the little town of Field at the edge of the YoHo National Park. We need to get a pass to travel in the park.

We've been desperate to see a bears again on this trip but no such luck. The only wild life we've seen is a couple of mountain goats and some deer. This stuffed bear in the Yoho park information center is the nearest we get to a bear.

From Field we backtrack a short distance and take the road to Emerald Lake. The lake is in the most  beautiful setting. There's a hike trail all around the shore line and canoes to hire to paddle the lake. The lake is fantastically beautiful and really is an emerald colour. It's caused by melt water from the mountains washing minute granules of minerals that float just under the surface of the water and the colour is a result of sunlight reflecting off the minerals.

We decide to have lunch at the restaurant in the lodge called Cilantro. The food is a Canadian/Italian fusion. There's mosquito outside so we dine in the cool of the vaulted ceiling lodge.

 

Further on and we stop to admire the site of the Spiral Tunnel. Here the original tunnel dug out by the old Railway Worker of the Canadian Pacific line became way too steep an incline for the increasingly longer trains to cope safely with. A way to make the incline less steep was to make the tunnels go through the mountain in spirals. There actually isn't much to see, but the Tourist Board have, on the viewing lay-by, set out panels giving all the history and mechanics of the tunnels. A kind of of mini open air museum.

Soon we leave the rugged splendor of the Rockies behind and pass across the British Columbia boarder into Alberta. The landscape slowly becomes gentler with rolling grass and scrub covered hills. Some of the higher hills are wooded with pine and birch. Soon, as the hills become less rugged the cattle Alberta is famous for can be seen roaming the fields. We've arrived in 'cowboy country.'

After about another hour and a half drive we begin to see the urban sprawl of Calgary. Yee Haw we've arrived. On the way into Calgary we pass the  site of the ski jumps of the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics. This is were Eddie Edwards, aka, 'Eddie the Eagle GB's first British ski jumper made his first and only Olympics. he became famous because he came last and was a brave but awful ski jumper.