Kootenay 1, Charlie 0

Monday 17th June

Today started solemnly with the departure of darling Sarah. We had a slow morning together before I dropped her in Canmore to catch her bus to the airport and fly back to Berlin. Oh - how fab it is to have globetrotting friends (lol). I spent the rest of the day resetting the van, doing a grocery shop, and stumbling upon the most amazing coffee I've experienced so far in Canada in a little cafe & roastery in Canmore called Eclipse. Good vibes, great coffee...what more could a girl want?

Tuesday 18th June

I got up early today to head to Kootenay National Park...which is technically in BC, so theoretically I completed my East to West journey of Canada today! I made some stops along the way - first at the Continental Divide (wow!) and then at a short hike to the Inkpot (aptly named, this little pond was fluro green, it was kinda wild that nature could produce something this colour organically).

I found my campground and settling in for the evening, cooking on the fire and reading my book. This campground was...interesting...it was unserviced, so you checked yourself in, and had pretty basic facilities. I was shattered to find there were no showers as I'd been banking on it, with my hair desparate for a wash. That's tomorrow's problem.

Wednesday 19th June

My hair contained so much grease at this point I could set up my own supply line with every fast food joint in Canada, so I scraped it back into a ponytail and set off on today's adventures - determined to find a body of water to remedy the situation before it grew even more dire.

I started by heading into the nearby town of Radium Hot Springs. Wow this was straight out of a movie...and not a good one. The road into town had clearly been blasted through solid rocky mountain...and they'd only blasted it just enough to fit a vehicle through. Budget cuts perhaps? You wouldn't want to have a wide load. Alas, while Radium Hot Springs didn't offer much, it did offer phone reception, which I needed to plan my day (circle back to me not being an organised traveller).

I downloaded the maps I needed, and set off back into Kootenay itself, heading for the Simpson River Trail. This trail is the start of a multi-day hike, but you can do sections of it to make it shorter for day hiking. When I arrived I saw a welcome sight - I stunningly blue, gatorade blue, crystal clear, rushing river. Hello hair wash! But first - to get sweaty on a hike. I set off on the trail, and the views I was treated to were unexpected to say the least. I didn't realise until I arrived, but Kootenay had been victim to many bushfires that swept through the region over several years, dating back to 1991, and as recently as 2018. This left the land at mixed stages of desolation and regeneration and it made for an interesting and varied landscape. I finished my hike and arrived back to the van eager to take a swim in the rushing water of the Simpson River. I did have some onlookers, as the trailhead was busy, so I had to put my big girl pants on and just do it anyway. You guys. It was unexpectedly the coldest water I've been in to date. And Moraine Lake was almost entirely frozen, so this is saying something. The idea of washing my hair was becoming rapidly less appealing with every step I took into the frigid water, but we take no prisoners here. So I dunked my head...and...instant agonising brain freeze... and I hadn't even shampoo'd or conditioned yet...

20 minutes later, fresh as a daisy, I sat on the floor of the van with my frostbitten toes by the van heater (ok fine, I didn't actually have frostbite, but this may be the closest I've ever come). I spent the afternoon enjoying the sun by the river, before heading back to camp. Here I had some new neighbours, Sandy & Dave and their adorable dog who facilitated our meeting. Sandy & Dave had 2 kids, roughly my age, one they adopted, and one Sandy conceived naturally. We bonded over shared adoption stories, and Dave kindly fixed my poltergeist cupboard.

An aside - for those who may not know, I have loving started to refer to the cupboard under my sink as the poltergeist cupboard. The latch is broken, and both of my 19L water jugs have a bad habit of ejecting themselves from said cupboard with such force, vigour and enthusiasm that the only reasonable conclusion I can draw is that there is a friendly and mischievous poltergeist living under there. It's favourite time to play this trick on me is when I'm driving 110km/hr down a freeway. Each time it happens I have to rapidly pull over and count my lucky stars they didn't explode, pouring 19L each of water all over my floor. Knowing that the day that they eventually did explode due to the unnatural force at which these jugs seemed to toss themselves from the cupboard was coming, I have been eager to fix the latch, but with no tools to do so, it kept being put on the back burner.

Sandy & Dave gave me their contact details and told me if I was ever in their area I simply must call in and pay them a visit. I went to bed happy to have met them, but oddly sad I had vanquished my poltergeist.

Thursday 20th June

Well today didn't go as planned. I set out to hike to the famous Floe Lake (named for the ice floes that grace its surface year round). This beautiful lake is an iconic day-hike in the region, a 22km challenging route it isn't for the faint hearted, but I've never been accused of that label so I was keen to swim in Floe lakes blue waters.

I'll take a moment here to remind you about the weather. I haven't complained about it in this post yet (how remiss of me) but it's still unseasonably (Laura - I still this this is a fake word) cold, snowing when it shouldn't be, and just all round...making those who say climate change is fake look worse than they already did.

Ok, with that context in the back of your mind, please join me for the sunny start of my hike. Water, snacks, and spikes on my back, I left the carpark totally alone, and eager for what the day would bring.

The first 8-9km were beautiful, open fields, walking along the ridge of a moutain. The last several kilometers were a great preview of how to torture me if I ever end up in the underworld. While I'd been climbing and gaining elevation steadily the whole time, most of this hikes elevation seemed to come all at once, right at the end. Now I'm not stranger to a hard hike, and it is in the huffing and puffing, the aching legs, the racing heart, that I relish and thrive. But then I hit some snow. Checking my map, I was only about 1km short of the summit, and the lake, so I figured I could probably make it, and really...how much worse could the snow get in one measly kilometer? (Oh ladies and gents, how we look back at this naive Charlie and laugh at her). The snow rapidly started to deepen, and it was clearly untouched. No one had been here but me. No one was stupid enough. Within a few switchbacks of deciding it couldn't be that bad...it wasn't only bad, it was worse. I couldn't see the trail at all, and I could see wolf, bear, and moose tracks. Look, I'm not scared of the wildlife of Canada...until I'm battling through waist deep snow at a pace a snail could outrun. It wasn't moving anywhere fast.

Just when I thought my situation couldn't get worse...it did. If you are my mother, I implore you to stop reading now, lest you retrospectively feel the need to fly over here just to give me a solid dressing down for continuing despite the next words I am about to type. Seriously mum. Stop now. Also... I did (clearly) live to tell this tale. So... it's fine? Right? Ok, now that we've got rid of my mother... I started to hear avalanches. Plural. To paint the picture I was ascending a mountain that was large, but was in the shadow of some monster mountains. Floe Lake sat at the summit of the mountain I was climbing, nestled at the foot of the greater mountains that rose on 3 sides around it. And those mountains were shedding their snowy winter capes with a ferocity and urgency that I have never seen. I ascertained that I was safe from them, however it did not make for a comforting hike - battling through snow that was at times chest high, forcing me to crawl, clamber, and straight up battle through, with wolf prints crossing my path repeatedly, and the mountains that rose around me singing their avalanche song. But I was 600m, then 400m, then 200m from this damn lake, and in true sunk cost fallacy mindset, I was going to see this damn lake - I'd come this far.

By now, what did not occur to me at the time, has probably already occurred to you. I only ask that you give past-soaking wet-sweaty-tired-Charlie the grace of realising that I was not thinking much beyond the next literal step I had to take at the time. You have the benefit of sitting in the comfort of whatever armchair, couch, or seat you are reading this from. But yes...Floe Lake was invisible beneath a frozen tundra. I was not going to get the beautiful blue lake I had set out to find. In fact... I stopped short of even reaching it, standing at the sign for the lake, was when I had the sinking realisation that I couldn't tell where the land ended, and the lake began. Hidden beneath ice, and snow, there was no way I could walk to the "waters edge" as it were. So I stood, defeated, exhausted, up to my chest in snow, listening to avalanches crash down around me, panting, realising that there was no way I could take another step without risking crashing through the ice of the lake.

I turned around. It took me half as long to get below the snow line as it did to get up there (oh and I forgot to mention at one point I climbed a literal cliff...made possible only by the fact it was covered in snow), and half the hike down to stop feeling a mixture of defeated, angry, frustrated and like a failure. But half way down, walking through a meadow of wildflowers, I realised that being annoyed was pointless, and that "it's not the destination, it's the journey" that matters. I'd done something challenging, I'd pushed the envelope, I didn't fall of a cliff, get eaten by a wolf, or crushed under an avalanche. Maybe I didn't get to see the pretty lake, but I gained a lot more than if I had.

Back to camp to dry off and warm up. Tired and sore, early night. Not many photos - was too busy fighting through the snow.

Friday 21st June

Sore from my previous day's misadventures, I decided to have a relaxing day, returning to the Simpson River to laze on the rocks like a lizard, soak up the sunshine (gotta do it when you can here), swim again in the ice cold water, and enjoy the day before driving back to Canmore in the evening to park in Alex's driveway.

Saturday 22nd June

Having more or less been non-stop for several weeks, I took today to just stop. Something they don't talk about enough with travel (especially travel when you aren't planning everything in advance) is how exhausting decision fatigue can be. It's a real thing, and even on days like yesterday, the decision fatigue is real. Where will I drive to? Where will I stop? Where will I get gas? Will I make it there, or should I stop earlier? If I stop here what if there is a better spot further on? What time do I need to leave so that I arrive on time? Do I need water? Where will I get water? All of this is made harder by often not having an reception to look up things like gas stations, water sources, or anything of the sort. They might sound like silly, small things, but when your day is a constant cycle of unknowns, and making choices, never sure if they're the 'right' ones, it gets tiring.

So today, I cleaned the van. I got the water. I filled the fuel tank. And I just stopped. And it was great, and much needed. When Sarah visited, she urged me to slow down and rest - she probably sensed how exhausted I was, and her constant refrain to me has been echoing in my head since she left, "you can't be a tourist every day." So I'm adopting that mindset for the rest of my trip, and some days I will simply live, and exist, but not be a traveller, not be a tourist. Today I wasn't a tourist. I went to my favourite cafe in Canmore (tourists don't have favourite cafe's, see, already learning haha), I took my book, my laptop. I read. I journaled, I mailed postcards, I shopped for some gifts. And then I drove back to Alex's house and parked for the night and watched Sabrina the Teenage Witch all evening.

Sunday 23rd June

Today I roadtripped to Banff for the final week of my Rockies extravaganza - not much to report, I've done this roadtrip before, the sights were familiar and honestly, at this point I've been in the Rockies so long that this drive feels like coming home, it feels like a warm hug, it's familiar...there are no...decisions.