Fri 19th Aug - Golden to Radium

View from our balcony

What a lovely lovely view to wake up  to!

The sitting room

We had a huge and delicious breakfast with the other guests (the couple from last night and another Canadian family) - we had blueberry pancakes, brown sugar sausages, crispy bacon, scrambled egg, fresh fruit, yoghurt, cereal, coffee, etc etc, it was most excellent. All was
homemade by Jeannie (the owner), and when we left she came after us with a pot of fruit salad, 2 croissants and a bag of  homemade cookies to tide us over. I think it's one of the nicest places I've ever stayed in, shame we had to leave!


After a bit of deliberation we headed to a local buffalo ranch which you can visit. The owner Leo Downey used to be a country singer down in LA, but moved up here to try to be self sufficient 20 odd years ago. He took us out to see his big hairy buffalo who (eventually) obligingly came out to see us in their mountain-ringed pasture and he told us all about them and their habits. After we'd walked back he played us a guitar tune he was working on and when he finished and we clapped he smiled like a little kid. We bought his CD of course.

Then we headed off to the kicking horse resort which the family in the b&b had recommended. First we went up in a chairlift to a bear refuge where a grizzly bear called Boo lives. Boo and his brother Cari were orphaned when a poacher illegally shot their mum (by the side of a road where tourists had also seen the bears and stopped, and they took photos of him and his number plate when he did it, so he was quickly arrested...doh). Mostly orphaned bears are put down but they set up 22 acres for them to grow up there, do they could study the best ways to deal with orphaned cubs (they are now setting up other remote locations with no human contact where cubs can spend their first few years with a bit of support before being released into the wild). Cari has died but Boo is now 9 and has figured our how to do all the bear stuff by himself, even hunting, which is why they now know it's worth helping cubs out at the start and not just putting then down. Boo can't ever be released because he sees people too much and had lost his fear of them, so would be a nuisance bear and end up being shot. However he has escaped twice from his enclosure (by digging a big hole by the fence and bending back the metal panels below the ground!!) during the mating season. The staff saw a blond female grizzly in the area...and saw her again the following year with one blond cub and one dark brown one, so it seems Boo may well have fathered some cubs. After his exploits he came back to the enclosure by himself.

We went back down the chairlift and had a late lunch of fruit salad, a homemade lemonade from the pub, a croissant, a ginger cookie and half a melting moment. Very nice.

Mum Adventuring

Then we used the other half of our ticket to go up in a gondola lift which was the longest and highest ever, taking us up from the valley floor over the nearest ridge to the highest point around where you should see all the surrounding mountains and glaciers. The views were amazing. We went for a walk along one of the ridges along some quite steep & precarious tracks. It wasn't a particularly long walk but it was marked 'easy' - god knows what the other tracks were like! (I did go down one of them and ended up going back when it got so steep I was sliding down).

Most of the visitors weren't walking at all, they were biking down various tracks marked s, m, l and xl. We could see some of the things they were doing from the cable car and it looked quite scary. While we were up there we heard and then saw a pika...we only knew what they sound like because there was an interactive exhibit at the glacier and I pressed all the buttons to hear the animal noises. They are like a cute tail-less mouse but a bit larger and run really quickly or sit really still.

By now it was high time to head to Radium so mum drove the last hour and a half and we got in about 8.30. The Polish / Russian / Lithuanian speaking motel did also have a smattering of English and we managed to check in without too much difficulty. Not a patch on yesterday's accommodation I must say but it is clean, has free wifi and is right in Radium which is very handy. The hotel lady recommended an Austrian restaurant just up the road (there does seen to be a bit of Tyrol-meets-Canada going on in Radium) so we went there.

Schinkenspaetzle. Oh yeah.

We were greeted by a Lederhosen-clad real live Austrian and had a surreal dinner of Bauernsalat (mum) and Schinkenspaetzle (me) served by the largest waiter I've ever seen, who grew up in Canada on a farm where only German was spoken - but has since forgotten it all.

Then it was time to nest and for once I was tired out from doing things and slept all night long and that was a good thing.