The Canadian Rockies

Lake Louise

  The Canadian Rockies should be on everyone's bucket list. Heck, Banff National Park should be on everyone's bucket list! Especially for the nature enthusiast. If you hate nature, no worries, it's one less place you need to see.

Matt and I got some sweet vouchers from Delta for volunteering to miss our flight on our trip home from Saudi in December. It didn't take us very long to decide we wanted to go to Banff National Park in Canada.  I believe it's a little more than an hour or so from Calgary, Alberta. We couldn't decide if we wanted to actually go to the Banff Mountain Film Festival, but the price to see the films kind of deterred us and we decided we just wanted to do some back country backpacking instead. The film festival comes to SLC in February anyways. ;)

Backpacking

We did what's called the Skoki Loop. It's pretty populair and GORGEOUS. I recommend it for anyone who is going to Banff & interested in backpacking.

The Skoki lakes. I took this with my phone so it's not nearly as good quality as it could be, but this was probably  my favorite scene. Look at that glacier blue water!

 

We slept in this valley

Our little orange tent. Let me tell you... boy, does it rain! Our tent is pretty water resistant, but with all the rain we got little droplets on the inside. Nothing got too wet, but the tent was pretty soaked the whole trip.

The trail looked like this in a lot places

We saw cougar tracks! (Better than bear tracks!(

Get it? Fork in the road?!

We slept near Baker Lake one night

Merlin Lake behind us.

So there is a "cabin" up near the Skoki Lake. It may or may not be 200 dollars night, so if you'd like to the hike but dont think you're up for the tent or rain hike 6 or so miles to sleep in a cabin! :D They also serve all you can drink lemonade, tea, and coffee with little cakes for 5$ from 1-3. 


Tea Houses
I'm not sure what excited me more. The fact that they have this cabin cafe in the middle of the mountains or the fact that I didn't need to pack a lunch! Anyways, we hiked to one Tea House and then hiked to the other on our way back down. It's about a 8-9 mile trip. We ate tea biscuits, lentil soup (well Matt did...), cheese sandwiches, chocolate cake, chips and hummus, hot chocolate, and herbal tea. We were just so excited we wanted to taste everything! Which is why we went to BOTH of the tea houses.


You can read about them here.

 

Lake Louise

This may have been one of the prettiest lakes I've ever seen. I'm not exaggerating either. Best. Lake. Ever. I was taking pictures with my phone so the quality isn't as nice but it was GORGEOUS. In fact, a lot of the lakes in this area were gorgeous. It's that glacier blue. 

Lake Louise was pretty blue. 

The Lake Louise Chateau (no, we did NOT stay here)

Look at the chateau at the end of the lake. You can canoe on this lake too!

The Thing About Bears

We did not see a bear but we talked to a lot of people who had seen bears where we had been backpacking.  In most cases we had just missed seeing a bear or people had seen the bear after we had passed. We saw bear scat in a few spots too and had seen traces of bears digging for gophers. Matt was a lot more disappointed than I was about not seeing any bears. On our trails we made sure we were loud so we woudn't sneak up on any bears either. On many occasions, especially when I was alone either going to the bathroom or pumping water, I would sing girl camp songs at the top of my lungs. I'm sure I looked awesome, but I wanted all bears to stay away.

In the U.S. dogs are not allowed in national parks. At least in Banff, that wasn't really the case. People brought their dogs every where. Also because it's cold (it IS Canada) people let their dogs' hairs grow out longer so they're a lot bushier. (Can you guess where this story is going?)

So, Matt and I are hiking, fully aware there could be a bear at any corner. Then on the trail, out of no where, I see this big furry black thing walking towards me. My immediate thought is "OMG! A BEAR CUB!" (Which would be A LOT worse than actually seeing an adult bear, in my opinion.)  Not too long after that here comes a human holding on to the leash. My little heart is still panting as we walk pass them and all I can say is: "cute dog." What I really want to say is: "Im so glad you have a dog and not a bear!"

Other great vistas

 

I forgot why, but Matt really wanted to "dip" his feet into the water. It was really cold.

In fact, the woman in this picture hollered at Matt telling him not to do it. :)

It's crowfoot glacier! I'm not flipping gang signs I'm trying to show you the CROWFEET. :)

Peyto Lake

More Glaciers

Please remember these pictures were taken with my phone. Banff is SO BEAUTIFUL. I am not artistic enough to describe the phenomenal beauty of this place. However, I totally want to go back. I want everyone to experience Banff. There are still lots of places to go and to see if you're not into the backpacking thing. Dont let your physical ability stop you from making this trip or any other reason. You probably will never be rich enough, strong enough, old enough, or have enough PTO or free time to do this. So you just need to GO. Everywhere we went the mountains were sharp and stunning. I loved this place. I can't wait to go. There are still more places I want to hike.

Sometimes, we Utahns, scoff at people from the East Coast when they talk about mountains. We want to say: "Oh, you mean those hills?!"  If you're from Utah, that's the comparison between the Wasatch Mountain Ranges and the Canadian Rockies. We've just got some big lumps in comparison to them Rockies. 

#questival #cotopaxi

First of all, I'd like to apologize to my Facebook and Instagram friends for filling up your news feeds with my crazy photos/videos. I do usually like to limit how often I post bc I dont think people are as interested in my life as my ego would like to believe. I'm sure there are other people/things they'd rather be looking at. =D

All of it was part of Questival.

 Anyways, what is Questival?

Well someone had texted my husband about it a week ago. Matt asked if I was interested but I had Ira Glass tickets for Saturday night and we had a birthday party Friday night, it just didn't seem like it was going to work. However, on Friday April 11th I just had this itch that we needed to do it. So at Noon I called my husband and we go to work planning our route.

What was this 24-Hour Outdoor adventure?

It was a scavenger hunt! You see there was a huge list and each item on the list was assigned a point. You needed to take a picture of the activity and then post it to social media (facebook, instagram, twitter, Vine, etc) and use the appropriate hash tags. Here's an example of part of the list:

They had a few categories like quirky, hiking, service, adventure, community, etc. The Q was the number of the item on the list that needed to be included on the post and the hash tag. The smaller numbers were the points you got for the activity.

Why do this? To win a trip to Machu Picho, Kilamanjaro or Angkor Wat. I figured this was the first year they were doing it and if they continue to doing it every year my odds of winning would be better the first year. :) Besides, it looked pretty fun even if we didnt win!

I think doing it as a "family" was our second downfall.  (The first was not planning ahead to have someone take them.) You can only move so fast between feeding twins, changing diapers, and short/slow toddler legs. However, we didn't really have much of a choice. Had we planned better I'm sure we could have found someone to stay with our kiddos for the day, but at the same time, it was kind of fun to drag our kids around. They did awesome!!

Social Media

I am sure many of you, like me have a hate love relationship with social media. I recently saw that TIME magazine had a calculator that calculated how much of your life you had wasted on Facebook. Making a few assumptions, this calculator estimated that I had used 29 days of my life since I had joined Facebook. 29 days?!

My opinions on Facebook and my hate/love relationship with Social Media could be another blog post all on it's own. In any case, posting as much as I did really did make me feel uncomfortable. Everything about my life was out there for the public to see. If you want to do know where I was and what I was doing on April 12th, it's there. Go look it up.

As I mentioned earlier, I'm sorry if my obnoxious posts got in the way of you perusing Instagram or Facebook. Later on, much later, I realized how to use Twitter and realized that since I have NO FRIENDS ...uh... I mean "Followers" on Twitter that, it was the most appropriate place for me to post. If you think I posted a lot on Facbeook or Instagram you should see my twitter account  or Google+ account. I certainly went to town on those two networks!

I loved the scavenger hunt! I did not love so much the social media part of it. Again, my apologies for filling up your newsfeeds with my "important life". ;)

Here were some of my favorite moments of the scavenger hunt.

Camping!
Okay, go ahead and call me crazy because I did it with 3 kids and all under two. I really did enjoy it. On Friday night we went to a birthday party and then afterwards went to my Grandma's house in Sandy (we had to camp 5 miles away from our home) and camped in her back yard under the stars. It was a little chilly but not THAT bad. Everyone was dressed appropriately. Though camping with Calvin at this age has never been more fun.

Mind you, Calvin went camping for the first time before he was 2 months and that was in September. We have taken him several times since that first time and this was the best ever.

Calvin loved the fire and in his little way kept saying "hot! hot!" He never tried to touch the fire or get in it's way. He would dance around the fire as if trying to get a better look at it. Matt was having  a hard time with getting the embers to turn into fire. (For those of you who have started fires before.) Calvin came along and said "hot" and blew those embers right out!

My grandparents have about 2 acres of land or so. So there's plenty of space to lie in the grass and gaze up at the stars. Calvin just loved the open space and when Matt and I were ready to go to bed we couldn't get Calvin to lie down with us, so we just let him wander around on their property. I was grateful his shoes had lights on them so I could always see where he was, technically. Calvin never went too far away and he came back all on his own and lied down right in his "space" and went to sleep.

Although, at about 5am in the morning, Calvin crawled out of his sleeping bag and crawled into Matt's. One of the activities was to sleep in a hand made "shelter" and that's what Matt did while I just slept on a tarp with the kiddos.

Below is a picture of Matt sleeping under a tarp and our sweet son cuddled next to him.

Other highlights...

Selfie with a llama

Matt jupming intot he duck pond behind our house. You had to jump into a "body of water" and Matt was daring enough to do this. We wont talk about the stench that accompanied this brave act! My husband is AWESOME!

(Sadly when he did it the first time we realized the camera hadn't recorded him... so he had to do it TWICE!)

Donating money to The Leonardo.

Matt planking at City Creek! I dont know why, but I LOVED this one. :)
 I can't figure out how to embed it into blogger from Instagram, but follow the link. It was awesome

One of the "quirky" tasks was to find a parking cop and to fight them with a banana. Right when we were ready to call it quits and to head out we saw this guy. This guy was a good sport! I could tell he felt kind of awkward so I told him to give me a karate chop.

I posted this on Facebook and asked for 50 likes. Not only did I need to make a cake in the shape of a llama, I also needed to get 50 likes on something. Thanks for all of y'all who let me earn those points for 50 likes. :)

I hate to say it, but I am pretty proud of this llama cake.
Doesn't it look part peep, part jackalope, part turkey, part llama?

We went hiking up to the U and Ensign peak! It's hard to call the hike to the "U" legit because it really is just paved. If the U wasn't located in a "private" neighborhood we probably could have driven right to the bottom of it. Calvin walked the whole way!! ;)



Anyways... it was a pretty crazy day.

The "finish line" was at Thanksgiving Point. There was a free concert and llamas to pet! We were looking forward to hearing Mates of State play (for free!) but our kids couldn't last until 8pm. So we loaded up the fam back in the car and drove around the parking lot for a while, listening to what tunes we could hear from where we were at.

Orange Stripes

Calvin LOVES to hold his baby brothers. LOVES IT!

Holding two babies at the same time, just might have been the most exciting thing he has ever done, ever.

  

Being the newborns that they are, they can't sit up right so every time we pulled one away to readjust them or to save them from Calvin's pressing grasp, Calvin would motion with his hand and point letting us know he wanted the other baby to get back under his arm. HE LOVED THIS.

I am just sorry I didn't take any video.

He also loved to kiss them. This is where we ran into the most problems when taking pictures. If you notice while he kisses one he looses grasp of the other or he squeezes really hard as he tries to kiss them.

 

Taking pictures of two babies and a one and a half year old is rough, but oh so, so funny. 

I had a really good laugh.