Waterton National Park

We arrived at Waterton National Park late on Thursday evening. It had been a full day of driving. After we hit the Alberta border, the mountains faded away and this is the scene that greeted us...rolling hill after rolling hill and hundreds and hundreds of windmills. At first, it was a game for Max to count them all. He got mighty sick of it....they were unending.

Beautiful scenery as we approached Waterton...

We spent one full day (Friday) at Waterton. The first thing we did was drive the Red Rock Canyon Loop and then did one of the beautiful hikes along the canyon.

Binoculars anyone? Both my boys love using them.

On our drive from the Red Rock Canyon, Keith and I were both in the front of the truck chatting up a storm and not paying attention to the scenery around us. All of a sudden we clued in that Max was all excited and kept saying "A baby bear! I saw a baby bear!"  We didn't see any baby bear. So we stopped the truck and slowly started backing up on the road. And sure enough....way off in the brush was a bear. It wasn't a baby bear though - it was a mama bear! Trust Max's little eagle eyes to spy the bear as we are speeding down the road! See that little black dot in the window below? That's what caught Max's eye and alerted him.

And this is what the "baby" bear looked like a bit closer...

We saw quite a bit of wildlife in Waterton. Tame twildlife at that. See this deer sweetly resting in front of the RCMP car? There were deer wandering all over the town site.

And lots of little prairie dogs looking around. They're kinda cute!

We found a beautiful little beach at the town site and spent part of our afternoon there. Very windy there, but the hot sun evened it out just fine. Remember when I said that Max loves rocks and stones? This beach was clearly made for him. It consisted entirely of flat, smooth rocks. Perfect for building inukshuks...and thus the inukshuk building factory commenced right on the spot. See how excited he is about it?

And at inukshuk factory break time, it was time for skipping rock lessons.

Keith has so much patience and is great with teaching his little boy how to do stuff like this...

And then it's back to building inukshuks...

With scenery and a view like this, I could be convinced to work full-time at the inukshuk building factory. Just say the word Max and I'll be your right-hand-man for the job. :-)

And then we had to take a picture of Max posing like an inukshuk. When he gets something on his mind...he gets a bit obsessed with it.

Oh look...some more deer wandering around the parking lot. They were everywhere. Max thought he could get close enough to pet Santa's reindeer...

 

Not a chance buddy....

We left all our reservations and bookings for campgrounds until the last minute. And unfortunately we couldn't stay right in Waterton camping...they were all booked up by the time we got our act together. So we stayed at a campsite right outside the park. Which essentially was overflow camping for everyone who was like us and left it too late. The pictures don't look bad. But it really wasn't that great of a place. I'm not a fan of long grass...and what might possibly be living in it/creeping around in it/slithering....eeeek! This place had plenty of long grass...the showers were pretty decent but the bathrooms left A LOT to be desired. Some camping trips we've been on, we have struck gold with campgrounds. This trip....not so much. You win some, you loose some, right? The one thing that really scared me and took some getting used to was the wind. At night the winds would start gusting (I'm guessing it was something to do with the mountain air) and I thought our tent trailer (with us in it!) was going to go sailing over the moon. I was petrified every morning at around 3:00am when the winds would start up. Freaked me out.

This is back in Wateron Park. This is a little historic site of the first oil well in western Canada.

Beautiful beautiful beautiful scenery...

Friday evening, we went on an evening cruise which was a great way to finish off our visit at the park.

Waterton is located on the Canada/United States border. Part of our cruise was to the American side of the park which is Glacier National Park. This next picture shows the international border - it's the wide swath of trees that have been cut down. They keep that maintained throughout the year. It looks like a nice little path but apparently the brush/trees there are 6 feet high so it's not the nicest little path to walk on. Not that you're supposed to be walking on it either. You could probably get into some serious trouble if you were caught!

Here's a shot of the other side of the lake. Do you see that tall thin line on the left hand side of the photo running vertical? That's the international border. Left side is Canada. Right side is the United States.

And a photo of the three of us on the cruise. Oh look - there's me. Now you know for sure that I was along for this trip too! :-)