CALGARY CANADA 2016 - 3 - IN THE FOREST AFTER DARK WHERE GRIZLLIES ROAM

My friend Jeannie arrived late last night. We are delighted to be together especially with the prospect of the three days ahead of us. We leave early in the morning to make it to Banff on time to enjoy its surroundings a bit before diving into the depths of the national park. Taking my “now friends” Miriam and Gordon’s recommendation we cross the river to visit the facility they mentioned. However, the signs to Upper Hot Springs are appealing, too. All of a sudden both Jeannie and I are excited. Instead of riverside relaxation we are drawn to full relaxation in the hot springs! The appeal for each of us is different: She jumps into anything hot, pool, spa, spring! I am more nostalgic: I am thinking of the wild Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone, the Hot springs that cover a whole mountain side in Pamukkale, Turkey. The visions from both of these beautiful places make my heart beat faster… We start winding up the mountain ahead of us.  

On the way to Banff from Calgary

I have never been more disappointed with a hot spring in my life! A total commercial scam, if you are like me looking for minimally touched wilderness out in the nature, don’t ever go there. Somebody purchased the rights to the natural resource I guess, put up a building on top of it, posted Walt Disney style signs of exaggerated joy and lure… As we are curiously trying to figure out when we will get outdoors, we are constantly being forced to dive into a maze of hallways very much like those found in a gym, which finally get us into a locker room! I am fuming inside, but what can you do? If you can’t run away from something, try to see what might be good in it.
 

Rockies surround the commercialized hot springs of Banff

That’s what we both do. Lower our bodies into the pooled "hot spring", swim, chat, and relax. I do my laps finding my way through people, who are standing and chatting or playing ball. When Jeannie announces, we may leave any time I'd like, I dive back into the water for the last time with pleasure before we head down toward the Rockies.

As we wind down the mountain being back in the nature and the forest is quite welcome. The only thing that may be better would be to be on foot to feel the breeze on our skin and to view the scenery beyond boundaries.
 

The Rockies become more and more impressive as we move toward the park

As the road meanders on the hillside, the mountain breeze through the open windows still feels quite refreshing until we find ourselves back in the commercial crowd of Banff. Jeanne notices that the streets are named after animals here, as we pass the wolf street and the elk street and the rabbit street among others... The boundary between the City of Banff and the Banff National Park is very vague, soon, we are at the entrance of the park and in half an hour, at our hotel, Lake Louise Inn in the village of Lake Louise. We were expecting a true inn, one that would be more blended with its surroundings, more rustic, or at least feeling like it. It looks like Banff doesn’t have those small lodges and inns.
 

Village of Lake Louise at the foot of the Rockies

The inn does have a hot tub and a swimming pool though, and my, I will appreciate this feature much better tomorrow after 8 hours of hiking as we return to the hotel in the evening: I could never imagine how precious a gift it is to end such a vigorous day in a hot tub! I will be even more grateful to my dear friend Jeannie for getting us this hotel after all. Once we settle down, we head to the village and discover that it is actually a mini strip mall!

Mushrooms abound on the trails

Well, it is handy since we find a bear spray for $10/day rental and $50 for purchase. We rent it but at the end of our stay in the park, I will end up buying it since I will lose it! I learn how to use it should we encounter a Grizzly, which we have just learned to be abundant around here especially on high country hikes around Lake Louise. Adding one more to the list won’t make much of a difference for me since I have come across about half a dozen of them in my camping trips to national parks. As long as they are either behind a fence or at a distance neither one of us can bother or scare the other. But in the nature you never know. Now we can do our brief afternoon hike through the forest to Lake Louise. We estimate that we will be back before dark so we should be safe.

 

Under overcast sky Lake Louise is much more serene

Lake Louise itself is a spectacular glacier lake surrounded on three sides with sheer tectonic mountains, on the chest of the middle one of which there is a glacier that has receded to the highest elevations, but still, the bosom of the mountain is covered with a large curtain of ice. Very impressive. Jeanne and I meditate by the lake sitting on a log as we watch the glittering of the sun over its surface. After 2 hours of hiking up hill, this is a beautiful gift. The only ugly thing in the air is the monstrous Chateau Lake Louis that rises up to the sky like a sky scraper; so ugly, so out of place, with nothing compatible with the surrounding nature in or around it. I enjoy earning the beauty by hiking to a high country lake rather than purchasing it by driving to a "6-star" hotel like this one on high heel shoes.

Lake Louise has many faces depending on the sky and the light and the distance from it.

Soon, I will learn though that the hotel by Lake Louise was one of the many rural resort hotels Canadian Pacific Railway built way back between the end of the 1800s and the turn of the last century. Some of the surviving hotels include: Château Frontenac in Quebec City (1893), Château Montebello (1930), Royal York Hotel in Toronto (1929), Palliser Hotel in Calgary (1914) and Chateau Lake Louise (1890). We decide to “dine” at the hotel and discover that it has 3 restaurants! We go for the patio to at least be able to look at the beach rather than the hotel walls. A glass of wine coupled with prime rib turns out to be a good choice, having turned our backs to the chateau and faces to the setting sun and the extraordinary simplicity of the beautiful lake. We decide to head back without relaxing too much after dinner since we have a 2.6 km stretch to cover through the woods at dusk in order to get to our hotel and daylight is already gradually clearing away.

Rockies on the way to Lake Louise

Once we enter the forest, we are almost immediately at the mercy of the head lamp I had brought along. I am a bit anxious, but have to be brave and strategic to keep the bears in the vicinity away. I propose to Jeannie, such good sport, to tell each other our stories, some of which we already know, but who cares, we have to be loud to not allow bears enter our safety zone, rather let them know they need to move away from us if we happen to approach one. I start telling Jeannie one of my stories bear encounters, the scariest one, as we move through the dense and now fully dark forest:

Lots of tourists from all over the world on Lake Louise

I had camped at Yellowstone for the first time in 2003. Having moved to its southern entrance after five days of hiking, I had decided to do a hike toward Lake Lewis. After couple miles of walking through the meadow, I finally found myself along the Lewis River. I don’t think I could find even then the words to describe how beautiful the trail and the river and the foliage of mid-September were. The river was running playfully here, and relaxing with serenity there, splashing her water through a narrow point or against a boulder around a corner… On top of one of these boulders was a group of hikers, all men. They hollered at me and let me know that they had seen a grizzly going toward the lake about an hour ago.

Yellowstone Grizzly may be very scary!

I appreciated the information, but why were they chuckling?  I recall thinking “Are they pulling my leg with the hopes that I will join them? Or simply to scare me and get a kick out of it since I am hiking by myself as a woman?” I thanked them with a bold smiley statement “Thank you, I will whistle harder then!” Off I went, in 15 minutes already having forgotten all about the bear, fully absorbed by the visual feast all around me. After enjoying the trail that ran right along the river for over 2 hours, I arrived at the wilderness camp where half a dozen campers were already setting up camp. Friendly exchanges of fruits, tea, and cookies along with warm conversation over my half hour lunch break gave me enough rest to start my return journey. I was again mesmerized with the colors around me, the symphony of sounds of the nature in harmony; sometimes the river roaring to a crescendo, sometimes the birds from the opposite bank diving into almost a whisper, all the while, I was in a meditative trans on the trail.

Grizzly tracks on soft trail

At some point, though, as I started my climb on a steep but brief slope, it occurred to me that I hadn’t made any noise to keep the bears away. Perhaps it was the carving in the soil that I noticed when my subconscious mind must have whispered “hmm, it looks very much like a bear’s footprint that we saw at the information center the other day”. I had thought “Yes, as soon as I get up to the top and catch my breath, I should start whistling or singing”. Little did I know that the mother earth had different plans for me on top of the cliff.  I was still panting from the steep climb, getting ready to sing a song, for the sake of making a noise. The things that followed, I am sure occurred in a split second, yet, at the time, it had seemed to me as long as a lifetime: Out of the blue, behind my left shoulder came the most frightening, ominous roar I had ever heard, even in the movies. My reaction to the fight/flight/freeze situation, I am sure was a full freeze.

I wonder if my grizzly looked like this when he growled behind me...

Numerous, simultaneous conversations started in my brain: “Oh my goodness, this must be the grizzly the guys had mentioned” and “Oh my, I have to whistle”, alas out of my frozen mouth came the most miserable sound that had nothing to do with a whistle, no more than the most flat note on the musical scale. My mind was making fun of me big time: “Oh, Resmiye, look at you, you are so miserably scared, you can’t even make a sound!”. The scientific mind was more critical: “Whistling was prophylactic before the beast was here. Now it is right behind your back, what do you do for treatment?”

All this information can go through one's mind at 100 mph speed during an encounter

I was also debating with myself "Shall I turn around and see where it is? But they say, never look at the bear in the eyes, what if it happens to be looking at me?" And my emotional mind was merciless “You stupid woman, you left your teenage daughter in Iowa City, and you will be perished here in the hands of a grizzly. What will happen to your poor child at this age?” Finally, I was also amazed with how all these thoughts and plans were occurring simultaneously and at 100 miles/hour speed! Human brain is something else... 
 

I wouldn't mind seeing a grizzly at this distance!

Finally, my cortex started taking over one more time from within this entire cacophony. The hikers had told me the grizzly was going north. I was heading south. If we assumed, the grizzly was still going north, all I needed to do was continue walking as fast as I could in the direction I was heading, and this inference ended the cacophony in my brain and I took my first step at the end of that split second. Walking as fast as short of running. As soon as I felt, I was at least 100 yards away from the point I had frozen up, I started clapping my hands, singing, shouting, any noise I could make.

When I finally moved a safe distance away from my grizzly, I must have been smiling to myself...

Surely, I created such huge amount of noise that the peace of the entire forest was gone. Elks started screaming from across the water, birds took off in flocks in every which direction, a deer fawn leapt away crackling bush branches. It was quite a scene, almost my anxiety about the bear being transformed into the entire forest inhabitants… I was also laughing at myself for the chaos I had caused. Finally, having moved at least half a mile away from the incident site with no reappearance of my unseen grizzly friend, I gave myself the permission to calm down, slow down, and relax…  

 

My dear friend Jeannie and I before leaving Lake Louise

At the end of my story, Jeannie and I are laughing away like adolescent girls, at times hollering at the invisible bears that might be in the vicinity to stay in their caves, to not come our way, sometimes singing lullabies from our childhoods in English and Turkish. Eventually, when we get out of the forest to within reach of our hotel, we are both feeling blessed for having a girlfriend to do the things we both love to do together, at least once a year and with such ease and comfort. We will enjoy a good sleep tonight and we both know that we will have many more of these adventures together. 

Jeannie on the trail along Lake Louise