Sun. 6th September ‘26
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s our Canada trip has progressed through, we have both been impressed with how accurate and helpful the itinerary developed by Claude has been. We are now into our second week and every day we have a list of helpful suggestions as to what we could do and where good photo opportunities might be. However, comparing my notes for the day with Claude’s suggestions we have our biggest set of discrepancies yet. Some of this is down to us deferring some of yesterday’s suggestions to today (as they involved travelling down the road we are driving on today as we head to Radium Hot Springs) and some is down to things that just didn’t quite work out.
We have 230km to drive today, which is OK except for all of the activities deferred from yesterday. It also didn’t help that we lose an hour as we cross from Pacific time to Mountain time (whilst still staying in British Columbia). Why would you do that? Janet whips us into action and by 9am we are on the road. First stop is after just 20mins at the Giant Cedars Boardwalk. Like it says on the tin, this is a 500 m boardwalk through old-growth inland temperate rainforest, with some of cedars 600+ years old. Although quite busy, we had great fun here trying to make compositions from the standing and fallen trees all in a beautiful soft green light.
We’re conscious that we’ve barely started the day’s drive and so it is with heavy hearts that we decide to miss out on the Skunk Cabbage and Hemlock Grove boardwalks. The names sounded intriguing, but they weren’t that much further on from the cedars. This might have been our first mistake of the day. The Rogers Pass Discovery Centre was a must stop for us. We had been slowly climbing since leaving Revelstoke and Rogers Pass was one the key mountain passes the train had to get through. The centre would have had displays on the stories of the building of the railway line – if it had been open and not undergoing renovation. At least Janet was able to grab a fabulous picture of the mountains looming high above the pass.
Next on the itinerary was the town of Golden where there are two interesting bridges. We were intrigued by the suspension bridge over a 130m canyon, but this turned out to be a theme park with a zip-line and even worse – a queue to get in. Moving on quickly, the Kicking Horse Pedestrian Bridge (Canada’s longest freestanding timber-frame bridge) turned out to be much more our cup of tea and we spent a few minutes trying to get some worthwhile photos before crossing to find a café for our lunch. I quite liked this shot of the beams in the roof looking down the length of the bridge.
That was it for Claude’s suggestions for the day and we only had c. 1hr 30mins of driving left. I was starting to regret missing out on the earlier boardwalks. So, Janet does a bit of searching along our route and discovers the Lower Bugaboo Falls. Not only do these falls have a great name, but they are only a short detour off our route and only involve a short hike. If you do a search for ‘Waterfall’ on our blog site, it returns at least 10 entries (even excluding all the posts about Victoria Falls or Iguazzu), so you know that we are big fans. We are willing to go trek some distance on bike, or foot or car for even what turns out to be quite a poor waterfall.
Lower Bugaboo turns out to be a gem. It is a 30 min walk from the car park through a wooded track. Even though there are some (short) steep sections is much easier going than yesterday. We even get to meet a friendly red(?) squirrel munching his way through a pinecone at a rate of knots. We soon get to hear the falls through the woods and then the path takes us close to the edge of the canyon through which we can see the fast-running river. There are a couple of viewpoints as we start to approach the falls. For our photos, it is a matter of trying to get the balance right between the setting of woods and the river and capturing the power of the falls themselves.
At the top of the falls, capturing an image is more of a challenge. Views are restricted by the steep rocky banks. Only by crawling (literally) out on a narrow rocky promontory was I able to get a view out over the top of the falls and look down as the water tumbled down. Discretion definitely won out over valour and you can see a piece of the promontory at the bottom of the image. Happy with what we had done and very happy to have found Lower Bugaboo, we headed on to Radium Hot Springs where we found that the hotel not only had some good craft beer (note Janet abstained from the beer!), but also we could have fish & chips for supper. A winning day!