Banff Trip - Day 2

We woke up the next morning to beautiful weather!  It was brisk but plenty of blue behind the puffy white clouds!!  We had all slept like babies with the rushing river outside the window (we all wanted to record the sound to play at home). We each only had a 40L backpack of clothes, and EVERYTHING going to the lodges with us was taken on pack mules.  We had our stuff ready before breakfast to get loaded to go.

We had a huge breakfast with oatmeal and eggs, and bacon and potatoes and muffins and probably some stuff I'm forgetting. The coffee was hot and strong!

Around 10 am we mounted up and took off to our next destination.  We continued to loosely follow the river.

At times we got up quite high near the top of the tree line.    Madison was all smiles.  At one point I told her to, "Look up".  She later told me those two words brought her back into the moment and out of her head for the rest of the trip.

It had been a rough winter in the Banff area. We saw indications of many landslides and many trees came down.

In the picture below it looks like this will be the path we go up.  This was actually a narrow landslide path.  Very often we could barely tell we were on ANY path at all!

Although the day was quite beautiful, many of us still wore our cowboy slickers. They were fabulous for holding in your body heat and protecting us from branches and small trees.  They also made great "tents" for doing your business in nature!  Tree and I tended to be the two that made use of that fun feature the most!

This was my second riding trip with Jill.  This trip we both had our daughters with us.  In some ways that made it a little more stressful since we had others to worry about besides ourselves.  But it was also such a great bonding time for all of us.

The view just got more beautiful around every corner. It was still "spring" here and everything was just blooming so the "green" was still fairly light.

Riding through some of the areas strewn with huge rocks from past landslides were more reminiscent of Iceland except here, trees were still managing to grow.  Iceland's rocks were from volcanos so a bit different!

Our stop for lunch this time was high up in the edge of the woods. Another group doing a different trip joined us.  Once again, Tess built a quick fire and grilled hamburgers for us.

Even up fairly high in the mountains, we would see have distant views of the crystal clear streams running down the mountains.

 Both of our guides, Tess and Hanna, took pictures of our group and shared them with us.  That's me and my horse with the white and brown butt!

We had thought it would just be our little group of 7 women since they had to make an "exception" for us to bring more than 6 people.  We were a little surprised to find we had Pierre as part of our group.  But Pierre ended up being a fun addition - a 63 year old man from near Marseille, France.  He had a hard time understanding all of us when we were all babbling at once.  He tended to bring up the back of the pack.

We did several river crossing. Sometimes we crossed on bridges and sometimes right through the water.  When we did use the bridges we had to cross one at a time since the bridges weren't all that sturdy.

And then we arrived at Halfway Lodge - our home for the next three nights.  It was nestled between 2   mountain ranges. Still fairly high up but more "valley" than mountain top.  We put our horses in their corral and headed up to the house to be greeted by Emily - our cook!  Halfway has no electric - not even solar. But she did have propane and managed to turn out some incredible meals every day!

Standing in front of Halfway Lodge looking to the east. The paths went to the outhouse and this amazing outdoor shower.

Looking to the west from the lodge.  This lush green area simply glowed.  There was still bits of snow on the mountains, even at some of the lower elevations.

And looking south where the river crept through the lower part of the valley.  We would cross this river several times over the next few days.  It also served as the refrigerator for the beer cooler - a milk crate filled with beer and anchored in the water!

The horses got settled in with grain and hay cubes (much easier to transport by mule).  With all the rain they had had over the past few weeks, their pasture was pretty much a muddy mess.  It would dry out quite a bit by the end of our 3 days there.

As the sun set, our "valley" dimmed but the sun didn't set until very light.  It was still fairly light well after 10 pm.

And since it was so light, Tess taught Madison and Samantha (Jill's oldest daughter) how to rope.  This is also a good picture of our little cabin.  Our room was on the top right.  There were 4 bedrooms  in total.  Each with a double bed and a set of bunk beds.  I don't think they ever actually have 16 people staying there though.  If so, we would have had to eat in shifts!

I joined in the fun of roping and we all got pretty good at it!  Later we had a bonfire with s'mores of course!