Johnstone Canyon

Continuing from my belated entry about the girl's camping weekend in June, here are the pictures from our hike up Johnstone Canyon near Banff on the Sunday of our trip. We packed up camp in the morning and drove the few kilometers from our site to the trail head of Johnstone Canyon. The canyon is really neat, since Parks Canada has built a walkway all the way along the canyon. Tourists of all sorts can enjoy the sites of this beautiful canyon - in fact, we had to navigate strollers and buggies at times.

We headed up to the lower falls along with everyone else, enjoying the twisting steep canyon as we went.At times we would walk on natural rock walkways or constructed wooden walkways. At other times, we would walk underneath rock overhangs, like below in the top left corner.The water was nice and clear:We reached lower falls without much adieu. You can see a bit of the falls in the picture below:We continued hiking up towards Upper Falls, which required a bit more climbing and culled out a lot of the strollers from continuing. We saw some more smaller falls on the way up:We made it to upper falls, which still had snow near it! In any case, upper falls were nicer than the lower falls:Here are the girls at upper falls:After upper falls, we really left the touristy region behind and continued on to the Ink Pots, several kilometers farther up the trail. After some up and down hiking, we came upon this beautiful mountain meadow where the Ink Pots lay:There was this neat spear of a mountain across the meadow, too:The Ink Pots are these blue pools with a very silty, quicksand-like bottom to them. They had a very nice colour to them:We headed back down after eating our lunch near the Ink Pots, taking a few more waterfall shots on the way:We also saw this big mother of a raven - he was huge! It's hard to tell in the picture, but he was a big boy:Although it was a little touristy, it's definitely worth the walk and I recommend it for others!