The trip begins: Calgary

Quick intro. C and I took a two week trip through Canada flying into Calgary, hiking through Banff, Jaspar, Revelstoke and Yoho, and flying out of Vancouver. I'm going to post pictures that capture the essence of the places we visited for the cities (as opposed to stock pretty photos), and for the national parks, I'll post all the alpine lakes inaccessible to most. August is the way end of the summer season, the marmots hibernate in September, so it was a wet cold trip.

The first thing we did after the plane landed was go get Poutine. It's cheese curds and gravy on top of fries. It sounds disgusting but it's actually quite good and very unhealthy.
We did frequent all the Canadian fast food establishments: Boston Pizza, Tim Horton's, New York Fries.

Another hot summer day in Cow-town.
A city of tremendous growth, new buildings beginning to obscure the view of the tower.

Construction of new condos.

One of many HBC's we eventually saw. It's Canada's first department store incorporated in about 1690ish. HBC designed Canada's olympic uniforms. We were privileged to watch CBC coverage of the olympics as opposed to NBC.

20 years ago Calgary hosted the winter olympics. This is what the ski jumps look like in the summer.