August 14, 2010 Waterton Park

Well after a great night’s sleep, we got up early and were on the road again. Highway 2, then turned down to Pincher Creek, we made it through town and headed down the highway towards Waterton. Len was a little tense; he still isn’t used to driving with the Jeep attached. The motor home pulls quite a bit and he really has to concentrate. Also with the Jeep attached it makes us much longer and harder to get around in tight spaces. I think that he is doing an excellent job. He keeps asking me when I want to learn to drive, but I figure he is stressed when he is driving, there is no way he would be able to relax with me driving. So we stopped just outside the park boundaries at a rest stop that gave some information about a park conservatory between the government and local ranchers. The W. Garfield Weston Foundation and local ranchers have preserved more than 100 square kilometers (27,000 acres) of Waterton park front into the largest private conservation initiative in Canadian history. Of course I had to check to see if there was a geocache there and of course there was. Quickly found it and then we were on our way into the park.

We had reservation for the town site campground which is right in the middle of the town of Waterton. Of course since we left the Crowsnest by seven in the morning, we arrived at the campground way before check in time. When I booked the reservation they didn’t have any sites for a motor home 28 ft or longer, so I fibbed a bit and said that we were 27 feet. So when we got there we double checked our site to make sure that we would fit, no problem, we even had enough room to park the Jeep in front. Since we couldn’t check into our site we decided to unhook the Jeep and take a quick tour of the town and go to the information booth to find out if anything was going on this weekend. We went up to the Prince of Wales Hotel, it is really quite magnificent and the view of the lake and the town is fantastic. We stopped in at the tourist information booth and made sure that it was okay to take Lindy on the trails with us, as long as we had her on a leash we were good. There were a couple of talks at night and we looked into the boat ride across the lake over to Goat Mountain on the Montana side of the border. We then went back to the campground to check in. After setting up camp we headed up to Red Rock Canyon and a geocache in the area.

We found a cache called the In the Footsteps of the First European Explorer, it was a mystery cache that took us to a history plaque about Lt. Thomas Blakiston. Originally a member of the Palliser Expedition, Blakiston, after several disagreements, continued on his own. Travelling south, Blakiston was particularly interested in finding a railway pass through the mountains. Reaching the area of the Crowsnest Pass, he asked his native guide what lay down the valley. His guide replied, 'many days of poor travel' (possibly relating to the large amount of windfall the aboriginal people, travelling on foot, preferred to avoid). Consequently, Blakiston missed the lowest and best pass in the Canadian Rockies for a railway. Had he discovered it, this may have changed the history of the west and national parks! When we found the cache it had directions to go to the Heritage Centre of the Waterton Natural History Association. There we gave them the info they needed; they gave us a book detailing Thomas Blakiston’s journeys and adventures. The book was written by the fellow who did the cache and his junior high school class. Very cool cache.

We then headed to Red Rock Canyon but unfortunately the parking lot was closed and the only way that you can get there was by bus, and unfortunately they did not allow dogs on the bus and it was over a mile each way to walk, so we found a rest area that had a real cool red river. The rock that is found in this area is called argillite which is a fine-grained sedimentary rock composed predominantly of clay and mud that has solidified into shale. Argillite is mainly found in the Queen Charlotte Islands, where they use black argillite to make carvings and sculptures. The rock in Waterton is bright red, hopefully the pictures can display this.

On our way back to the campsite we saw this brown object go running across the road. As we came up to the spot we looked up the bank and there was this little brown bear sitting back on his haunches tearing berries from the bushes and stuffing his face. We then finished off our day by having a great dinner and a nice walk along the lake and through the park.