Banff, Troll Falls, and Kananaskis Village

Crisia’s friend Meghan from Regina came to visit us over the weekend, so we had plenty to keep us occupied for a couple days. We took Saturday night off from setting traps to make plans to go to Banff for an evening out. We were at liberty to make such plans since Meghan was coming with her own car and could, therefore, drive us around. I’m not sure if I mentioned this earlier, but we do not have unlimited use of our vehicles and must record our kilometre usage and give in gas receipts. However, Meghan’s 4 hour drive turned into a 9 hour drive after receiving poor directions from a friend who neglected to tell her he couldn’t come until after she had been lost for 3 hours and later, her car suddenly stopped being able to go faster than 80. Since we had already made the plans, we took one of our cars into Banff anyway.

In Banff, we had dinner and drinks at the Rose and Crown pub. Nikhil, Crisia, Meghan, and I were joined by Kurt, another researcher at the field station, and his assistant Tracy. Dinner was very good. I was very excited to be having fish (maple salmon!) for the first time in a while. Our grocery budget would not allow for us to buy such expensive foods as sustenance.

We were soon joined by Crisia’s friend Justin from high school, who works in Banff and who was there with some friends, and some random guy from PEI who I think works on an oil rig. He just sat himself down between me and Tracy. He was incredibly high and spent a good amount of time talking to Tracy. Apparently he said some weird things about how he believed Germans were the greatest people ever and how she looked German because she was the only real blonde in the place. It was very loud in there, so I could only hear the people directly beside me only when they were yelling directly in my ear, so I didn’t hear everything he had to say.

This guy only addressed me once and that was to ask what animals I studied. I told him mice and voles. I think he thought I said wolves and asked me whether I sawed beavers in half to trap wolves. Crisia, Tracy, and I thought this was absolutely hilarious when we were discussing this a couple days later. Kurt ruined our fun a little by saying that he had a friend who studied wolves and they had a deal with beaver trappers. The beaver trappers would take the fur from the beavers and give the carcasses to the researchers who would saw them in half and stick them in freezers for use later to attract wolves. Maybe I should have studied wolves.

The pub had a live band that played some stuff that was very heavy on the bass. Music included Bob Marley, Sublime, and The Police. It was pretty good, but didn’t allow for a lot of conversation.

After the random guy disappeared, Kurt and Tracy went home and we waited until we were joined by someone Crisia and Meghan knew from a camp they both worked at in Kananaskis. He brought a few female coworkers from that camp who didn’t stick with us. After staying around for a bit, we went home. Since I’m not a big drinker, I offered to drive home. I had never driven this car before, which is a boat with little acceleration. This was a very interesting 45 minute drive on a highway with a speed limit of 110 km/h and no lights whatsoever in a car whose highbeams are as bright as a normal car’s headlights. That night was the latest we went to sleep in a really long time: 1am.

The next day, Crisia, Meghan, and I went for a short hike to Troll Falls. It’s about a half an hour there on a wide, fairly flat path. There is less of a path going to underneath the falls and above it. The path was rather muddy, and Meghan fell on the way down. She slid a bit and got her jeans and hands all muddy but was otherwise unscathed. Meghan risked taking her car out, and it would appear that the car only had problems going beyond 2^nd gear.

Afterwards, the three of us went for a lunch at a pub called Woody’s in Kananaskis Village. This is the closest pub to the field station, and we will apparently end up spending a lot of time there. Kananaskis Village is unfortunately not, as the name would have you believe, a village and is in fact a hotel complex. After lunch, we walked through some of the shops there. These shops are mainly souvenir shops.

There, we were hit on twice. Once by a group of pushy guys who upon being told that we were only browsing the shops suggested that we “browse together.” We didn’t take them up on that offer. The second time was by the clerk at one of the shops when I was buying some things. His method was a little less annoying and simply involved trying to keep us in conversation for as long as possible and suggesting many times that we come hang out at Woody’s over the course of the summer, where all the staff in Kananaskis go regularly, and he genuinely seemed to be a nice person and made it rather obvious that he was hitting on us by blushing at times.

We went back to the station after that and set traps in the evening before supper, after which we did end up going back to Woody’s for a round and some crab and spinach dip. Meghan left for home the next morning as we left to check the traps we had set the evening before (a morning which deserves a blog post in its own right) and emailed Crisia to say that she and the car got there in one piece later that day.

Updates: I have reorganized my photos a bit. Pictures of our trailer and other buildings at the field station were moved to Facilities at KFS. I’ve combined all my animal photos into the album Wildlife in Kananaskis and I have added some new ones including a couple of bighorn sheep and one of the behinds of some elk. We can’t seem to get a picture of them not running away. I have also updated my links to include Caitlin’s new blog Road to Zanzibar.