The Ashton Horde: June 2010

This past week, Josh and I went to Canada with my brother, sister and their spouses. We dropped the kids off at my parent's house and all 6 of us hopped in our car and headed north. My brother in-law is Canadian, and since seeing pictures of their trips to Banff, Josh has been dying to go.

It was probably the most beautiful place I have been to. The mountains are spectacular! The forests are nothing like I've ever seen before! Idaho's small potatoes (he he he) compared to the Canadian Rockies. It rained most of the time we were there. Which we didn't mind at all, in fact it made the mountains even more amazing and everything GREEN! It was kinda fun hiking in the pouring rain :) And the days we needed it to be sunny for photos, it was!

We checked all the boxes of wildlife we wanted to see, Elk, big horned sheep, deer and yes even a few bears!! We witnessed a couple of massive avalanches, beautiful blue lakes and water falls and lots of glaciers.

We had fun exploring the towns and even went Canadian bowling (They only have five pins and use very small bowling balls)

It was so much fun, and I would LOVE to live there! Eh? ;)

Lake Moraine
I love the mountains!

Soaking wet on one of our hikes!

Lake Louise Fairmont hotel
(no we didn't stay at this hotel)

Lake Louise view from the hotel

Luckily our one sunny day! We hiked way up behind the hills above the tree line where we saw a couple of MASSIVE avalanches, to the Tea House.

Tea House hike.

You can kinda see the tail end of an avalanche.

Peyto Lake
The water looks fake, and I kid you not it is bluer than this! And it was pouring rain. It is that blue because of the glacial silt.

Canmore, the town we stayed in, means big head.

Johnston Canyon
A beautiful canyon with 2 huge waterfalls that you can stand right next to.

The first bear we saw was HUGE!! We saw 2 more much smaller bears. All were right off the side of the road! I'm just glad we didn't run into this guy while hiking.
*looking at other pictures of this bear....he may have been a grizzly!! He had a very distinctive hump on his back! (...I specifically remember saying "It's a grizzly! It's a grizzly!" so I will go on record as calling that one. hehehe)