Kootenay National Park and Radium Hotsprings

Our next stop was Radium Hotsprings and Kootenay National Park.  Like Glacier National Park, the last time I'd visited was when I was a little kid, and Leo had never seen the park.

We stayed at Dry Gulch Provincial Park just South of Radium.  We really liked this campsite in open forest in the wide Columbia River Valley after the dark and rainy Glacier Park.  It's a small (20 sites) roadside campsite close to town and the park.

We only had a day in Radium so we did a driving tour of the park, stopping at trailheads and taking short hikes.

The first stop was at Olive Lake where we walked the boardwalk

and spotted this unusual sopallallie bush with orange berries.

We followed the Kootenay River

to McLeod Meadows where we followed a trail to the bridge crossing the river.

Our next stop was the Paint Pots. You follow Ochre Creek up to
the ochre beds where First Nations and later settlers mined the ochre.

It was quite a muddy business.

There were artifacts left from the mining business.

 You never know what you might find in a paint pot!

Marble Canyon was closed for reconstruction.  You can still hike there from the paint pots, but we didn't have time.

Quite a lot of the park has been burnt by wildfire.

We stopped at Flow Creek and walked down to the bridge over a beautiful little canyon.

We hope to come back another year and hike some of these trails.

Back at Radium we hiked up a short trail to the site of the former Radium Lodge, now demolished, for a view over the hot springs resort.

It's a modern facility but it's nestled nicely up against the cliffs and has a nice view of the surrounding mountains.

We planned to visit the hotsprings in the evening but decided instead to hang around our campsite.

Loop Trail

Our campsite in Glacier was called the Loop Brook Campsite named after the Loop, an engineering marvel constructed to reduce the incline of the railroad through Rogers Pass.

We checked out the 45 minute interpretive trail that winds around the remains of the Loop.

The campground entrance passes through 2 of these massive stone pillars

More pillars

The Loop passed over Loop Brook several times.

After failing to see any marmots on any of our mountain hikes we found a giant one scampering around one of the pillars in the creek valley. No photo, too speedy!

Lots of Russula mushrooms growing along this trail.

The loop was abandoned when the Connaught tunnel was built to bypass the avalanches in the pass.

Poop of the Day

We didn't see many birds or animals on the Great Glacier trail, but we did spot these.  Do you know what they are?

Great Glacier Trail

The weather was better on the second day.  We hiked up the Great Glacier Trail.  It followed the Illecillewaet River up to the bedrock below the Illecillewaet Glacier.

A view toward our destination

The trail goes by the ruins of Glacier House, the former National Park Lodge that was abandoned after the rail line was rerouted through the Connaught Tunnel to avoid avalanches.

Old boiler from Glacier House

Nearing our destination

The trail ended when we reached the bedrock, but you could continue up to the glacier.

We could see the Vaux Glacier on the left

The view was spectacular.  Though the Illecillewaet Glacier was hidden above us, we could see the Vaux Glacier across the valley and this waterfall:

Leo continued on up the mountain while I stayed behind,

but he eventually turned around before reaching the glacier.

It was too late in the year for most alpine flowers, but still lots of lovely rock garden foliage

and lots of very sweet blueberries.

Connie's reward!

We also tried out these western teaberries, new to us.  To our surprise they were tasty and sweet.

On our way back we took an alternate route and crossed the raging Illecillewaet River.

Glacier National Park - Rogers Pass

The next morning we drove the short distance to Glacier National Park and set up right away at the Loop Brook Campsite.

All the mountains were hidden in clouds so we did a short hike down to Bear Falls on Connaught Creek.

Money shot:

Later in the afternoon we hiked the short but steep trail up to Marion Lake and got caught in a downpour.  We hiked through deep forest so at least we were sheltered by big trees when we stopped to rest.



Luckily when we got to the lake it stopped raining and a few mountains peeked out of the clouds.

Here's Marion Lake.

We walked over to the scree to look for pikas, but we didn't see or hear any.

Trip to the Kootenays - Revelstoke

We camped in to the Kootenays for a week and drove as far as Revelstoke on our first day.  We stayed at the Revelstoke Campground, a private park.  It was  busy place with  duck pond, pet goats and a swimming pool full of kids, but we were down the hill in the non-electric section where things were pretty quiet until the train rattled by mere feet from our site.

After dinner we crossed those tracks and came to a cool canyon on the Illecillewaet River.

There were fish jumping the falls above the canyon.  

There was a giant logjam in the canyon.  At this level the whole river flows underneath

And then comes out downstream.

Camping Trip to the Chilcotin

We camped 3 days in the Chilcotin at the Horn Lake recreation site.  It was surprisingly busy for but we still had a quiet lakeside spot away from everyone else.

There was supposedly a trail going around Lily pad lake, but we followed it for 45 minutes (with no lake views) from marked tree to flagging tape until we could no longer find any markers or distinguish constructed trail from animal track and had to turn around.

Lilypad Lake lives up to its name.

We wound up walking down a road to the lake.

Later that day we paddled around Horn Lake. The next day we took the boat to nearby Sapeye Lake

Putting in on Sapeye Lake

and were greeted by a retired Williams Lake forester Jim Hilton.  He invited us into his cabin, served us tea and cookies and gave us the scoop on cabin life on Sapeye Lake.

Paddling on Sapeye Lake

It was nice to get out camping around our own neighbourhood.