Hoodoos

We had some long neglected chores to do today including driving to Cranmore to fill our two, 30- pound, propane tanks. The last time we filled our tanks was back in May, in South Dakota. In the summer-time, the only major task for propane is cooking. In the colder climates, when we turn on our furnace, it burns propane - a lot of propane. You can go through a thirty pound tank in 4 or 5 days.  Just cooking on the stove top doesn't take much, but I've been using the oven lately and that, apparently, uses a fair amount. The other day, when Frederick did a routine check of the propane, he had expected to find that we were still on tank #1. But no! The system had automatically switched over to tank #2 and when he weighed that tank found that we only had about 1/4 of a tank left. We had expected to find propane in Banff, but we had to drive the 15 miles out of the park to Cranmore.

There was also grocery shopping and some clothes shopping and all that took most of the day. 

We also had to move to a new campsite today. We are experiencing what happens when you don't get up early on "opening day" to make campground reservations in Banff. These past two weeks we had reservations at the Redstreak Campground in Radium Hot Springs, on the outskirts of Kootenay National Park. But we felt that was too far away from some of the great hikes that we wanted to do. That is why we were at Kicking Horse and then decided to come back to Banff (hiking plus full hook-ups!) and only spend three days in Redstreak.

When I went online to book a site in Banff for five nights I found that the only way to do that was to move to a different campsite every day. Last night we were in 510, tonight in B-5, tomorrow 204, then 210 (where we were when we had company), and finally, Thursday night, we will be in 203. It's not like we have to do a major packing up since we are only moving within the campground, but it is still a chore.

It was late, almost 4 o'clock, when we were able to get out and stretch our legs on the Hoodoos Trail. This trail also overlooks the Bow Valley; you can just make out the Bow River in the picture and Mount Rundle on the right.

There are the hoodoos, such as they are. We have certainly seen more impressive ones in North Dakota and elsewhere.

We found some more red chairs, this time overlooking the Bow River.  Maybe you can just make out the golf course over on the left side of the river.

The beautiful Bow Valley with Tunnel Mountain in the center. As you can see, we had some rain and it was cloudy all day.