Yoho National Park is another small park in the cluster of parks dominated by Banff and Jasper, but to us, it definitely has the most bang for the buck. After leaving Glacier, we stopped in Golden for groceries, so we didn’t hit the southwest park border until midafternoon. We knew that another FCFS campground was only a few miles into the park, and that the Hoodoo Creek campground had a nearby trailhead, so we decided we’d driven enough for the day. The campground was a little odd, in that it was just a gravel lot with campsites marked by poles and picnic tables. A couple of the sites had evidence of already being occupied, but we had no trouble finding a flat spot to park. We had lunch, and then went looking for the trailhead, not really expecting much after the decidedly unimpressive campground.
We were wrong, and the trail turned out to be the perfect hike for an afternoon. It was about five miles round trip, up and around the mountain to a spot with some pretty impressive hoodoos. The main trail took us to the top so we could look down on them, and then a shorter shoot of the trail took us down to the riverbed to get the view from the bottom. On the flats before we started climbing the mountain, we discovered that the campground wasn’t always lame, and that at some point there had been a standard national park campground with wooded campsites off loops with latrines and water, although it has apparently been abandoned for at least a few seasons. We suspect they just dragged the picnic tables from the old campground to the new parking lot campground since most of the picnic tables at the current campground look pretty well used.
We left the Hoodoo Creek campground the next morning, heading directly through the park on the Trans-Canada Highway. We decided not to do any of the activities off the highway, because one of the roads was not recommended for vehicles over 21’, and the other area of the park required reservations for hikes. But, that didn’t even matter, because we found plenty to see, with our first stop being the Natural Bridge. From there we took a walk around the village of Field, and then continued northwest.
Our next stop was probably our favorite thing to see in Yoho, and that was mostly based on totally accidental perfect timing. We had seen that the Spiral Tunnels were one of the sights to see, so we stopped to take a look. We were surprised how many people were there, and then we found out that it was crowded because a train was about to go through the pass and use the tunnels. We found a good vantage point and waited with the rest of the crowd, and we were not disappointed. In the video below, the train cars you see moving in three different directions are all part of the same train. The photo is a fairly clear map of how the tracks run through the tunnel. It’s an engineering marvel, and I don’t know if I would have believed it was real if I hadn’t seen it in real life. So, if you ever get to Yoho, stop at the Spiral Tunnels and wait for a train!
When the train passed, we continue up the hill to the Continental Divide, which is the Yoho/Banff park boundary, as well as the Alberta/British Columbia provincial boundary.