Banff National Park: Tunnel Mountain Trailer Village

We’re in the Rockies now. As soon as we crossed the Continental Divide and the border into Alberta we were in Banff National Park. As we came the additional 43 miles to get down to the town of Banff and our campground we passed numerous wildlife bridges and underpasses on Highway One. This is one of them.

This is a National Park campground, but with a name like Tunnel Mountain Trailer Court I wasn’t expecting much. Turns out it’s pretty nice.

We have full hookups and a reasonable amount of space around us.

There are two more campgrounds here. Tunnel Mountain Village I has more space but no services.

Tunnel Mountain Village II has only electricity, but no privacy at all, so I’m glad we were able to get a site where we are. I should say sites, because even though I went online the minute reservations opened, I couldn’t get six nights in one site. We’ve had two nights in site 403, today we have to move for one night to site 611, then tomorrow we come back for three more nights in site 403. Kind of a pain, but that’s how popular Banff is.

And with views like this…

you can understand why.

The day we got here I walked the two miles into town to the Visitors Center. This is the first half mile of the trail.

Then you emerge into the very busy town.

All around the backdrop is the mountains.

It’s really quite pretty,

most everyone has a mountain view.

Yesterday Bud and I took a walk through the campground to a nearby viewpoint.

On the way we saw several of these guys, they almost looked like prairie dogs. They are Columbian ground squirrels, and are larger than any other ground squirrels we’ve seen. Their burrows were right between the sites in the campground.

The lookout we walked to was to view these hoodoos; certainly not anywhere near as impressive as those in Bryce Canyon,

but quite incongruous in this beautiful valley of the Bow River.

They had the famous red Adirondack chairs and Bud took my photo as I tried them out.

After lunch Bud dropped me off at the Surprise Corner trailhead. He couldn’t even take a look as there was nowhere to park. The black car is waiting for someone to come out, so it can go in.

There were a lot of people around,

but as soon as I turned onto the longer trail I was alone.

This trail led along the base of Tunnel Mountain…

and along the Bow River.

A lot of it was a pleasant walk through the wooded valley…

and it was well marked.

Eventually I got far enough away to get a good look at Tunnel Mountain.

I haven’t been able to find the name of this mountain, but I like it. It looks like a wave done in stone.

My trail went up over a spur of Tunnel Mountain that reached the river.

Now I was along all of Bow River. I realized on seeing this that the first view was a channel around an island. This water, like all the rivers and creeks up here, was very cold;

those kayakers better stay upright unless they want a real chill.

I got a pretty good workout as the trail led from the river…

back up to the level of the lookout we visited in the morning. Unfortunately smoke was moving in. There are no fires close, so the amount of smoke depends on the wind.

Now we’ve just finished our move to site 611. This afternoon we’re taking a drive to see more of this beautiful country.