Canada’s Glacier National Park changed our definition of what a national park should be. After driving through Banff, we had figured the Canadian national parks were pretty much the same as the US national parks. Yes, Kootenay was much less crowded, but it’s just a small skinny park running along a river. Canada’s Glacier NP is about the same size as the US Glacier NP, but the experience was completely different and, sad to say, to our minds, better. The access road for the Canadian Glacier National Park is the Trans-Canada Highway, but despite the easy access, the park was much less crowded than the larger US parks. We drove to the Illecillewaet campground, and found a spot right on the river without reservations. The campground is at a trailhead for a whole series of trails in that area of the park, so we were able to take a short walk around the Glacier House ruins with the dogs, and then take a longer walk down the old rail bed that used to run to Glacier House. One difference between the US parks and the Canadian parks is that the Canadians don’t get so wound up about dogs, and leashed dogs are allowed on almost all of the trails. However, we still elected to leave the dogs in the camper, and we were glad we did because we saw a number of people with their dogs on the trail, and it would have been a bark fest with Ty.
We booked the campsite for two nights so we could take a longer hike up one of the mountains the next day. However, it started raining sometime in the night, and was still showering steadily for most of the next morning. We spent the morning doing inside things, and when the clouds parted after lunch we decided to take the hike anyway, figuring that with sunset well after 9PM, we weren’t going to get stuck in the dark. We strapped on the bear spray, left the dogs in the camper, and started the climb up the mountain to Avalanche Crest. We climbed 1,890 feet in just a little over two miles, and used the many magnificent views as a reason to stop and take photos. With all the beautiful sights we’ve seen in our year of traveling through amazing national parks, the scenery in Glacier easily surpassed anything we’d seen, and we both said “wow” at pretty much every turn of the trail. It probably helped that the weather was still very changeable, so we had all sorts of interesting light as the sun sent rays through breaks in the clouds onto the glaciers below, but this backfired in the end because it started to rain in earnest when we were at about mile 2.25 of 3 miles on the way to the crest. At this point we were climbing up a stream bed of slick rocks, so we did something we rarely do and decided to turn around before reaching the end of the trail. The climb down was definitely slippery, so we were ultimately glad that we’d decided to turn back and made it down safely.
The next morning, before leaving for Yoho, we took the dogs for a walk around the Glacier House ruins, imagining what it much have been like to be dropped off at a grand hotel along a river surrounded by glaciers. Nothing remains of the hotel but stone and cement foundations, but enough of the ruin remains that it’s easy to imagine staying in the hotel and looking at the views as you listen to the river. The hotel closed after only about 30 years of business because the train tracks were moved to a tunnel after avalanches kept blocking the tracks, and many people lost their lives trying to clear the tracks. Once the tracks didn’t run right by the hotel, people started going to hotels in Banff and Lake Louise that were still right off the rail line, and Glacier House closed.
