After a quick trip through Kootenay National Park, our Rocky Mountain road trip continued into Banff and Yoho National Parks. I’ve been to Banff a few times since the pandemic, so Banff was really more of a stopover on the way to Yoho, which was the highlight for the second half of our trip. Unfortunately, there aren’t as many frontcountry camping options in Yoho, and given that it was the long weekend, the only campsite we could get was in Lake Louise.

It was still cool though because the last time I camped in Banff, I stayed at the Tunnel Mountain campground, so at least I got to try something new! Camping in Banff is really unlike anywhere else I’ve ever camped. It’s so incredibly popular, not just in Canada, but all over the world, so it has some really unique campsites. I can’t think of anywhere else except the National Parks in the Rocky Mountains where there are multiple campgrounds boasting hundreds of car-camping sites. So we were able to get a site for 2 nights with minimal advance planning, which was good because even with almost 400 sites in this campground alone, it was sold out by the time the long weekend actually arrived!

The other wild thing about the campground is that it’s surrounded by an electric fence to make it completely bearproof! Even so, they still occasionally wander in, so you still have to be bear safe, but it’s a cool idea. We arrived in the late afternoon and took it easy for a few hours. Our friend, Jason, from the Rockwall Trail had finished his thru hike on his section of the GDT, so he met up with us to celebrate! We opted to check out the Station Restaurant, which is a restaurant that’s been set up in the old school Railway Station. It even has some tables in an old railway car! The food was delicious and we chowed down on our second elk burger of the trip before heading back for an early night.

We had to go to bed early because we had an early rise for our guided hike to Mount Stephen. Since I started dating Seth 12 years ago, I learned that there is an incredibly important fossil site in Yoho National Park called the Burgess Shale. Seth’s been dying to visit it for years, so when we planned a trip to Yoho, I couldn’t help but check out the guided hikes. There was still some availability, so I booked a visit, even though I had a lot of guilt over going without Seth. Bbut it was honestly so much fun, I’d be more than happy to go again with him in the future!

The Burgess Shale is a UNESCO world heritage site that is recognized around the world as one of the most well preserved, and oldest, examples of soft-bodied marine animals, dating back 508 million years to the middle Cambrian era. The entire site is protected, so the only way you can visit it is on a guided hike with either Parks Canada or the Geoscience Foundation. There’s two locations to choose from, either Walcott Quarry or Mount Stephen. Walcott Quarry is 22km round trip, while Mount Stephen is 8km. The catch is that both have over 800m of elevation, which makes Mount Stephen an incredibly steep and taxing hike, with a grade of ~20% for the majority of the hike.

I originally picked Mount Stephen because I thought Walcott Quarry was the more famous of the two sites, so I figured I’d save that one to do with Seth. Now that I have visited, I don’t think one is more famous than the other, but I think I made the right choice because I went with two other hikers, so we enjoyed the challenge of Mount Stephen.

Our tour was with Parks Canada. There was 10 people on the tour and we left from the visitor center in Field at 7am (hence the early wake-up call). Our guide seemed delighted with our group because everyone was pretty fit, so we made a really good pace on the hike. It’s honestly a top-notch tour and we learned so much historical and scientific information on the tour. The Mount Stephen site was discovered first and is credited to Charles Walcott in the early 1900’s, but we learned that Walcott is really the one who made the site famous, but didn’t really discover it.

It was likely first discovered by the local first nations groups, and then later by a surveyor for the railroad. It was just Walcott that really understood what he was looking at and drew attention to the site. Walcott collected over 65,000 fossils between the two sites and for many years, anyone could hike up to the site and take a fossil. That’s not the case now. You must be accompanied with a registered guide and if you try to sneak in otherwise, there’s several cameras that text your photo directly to the park warden, who will then come and escort you down with an automatic appearance in court. But with a guide you can enjoy the experience in peace!

It’s definitely a steep hike. It’s a slog the entire way up. You break out of the trees about 75% through the hike and we had a nice break along the ridge before continuing up another steep climb to the quarry. The quarry is a shale rock site literally located right on the side of the mountain. It has incredible views of Field and the surrounding mountains and I would have been willing to do the tour just for the views! But the fossils are really unreal. Like I said, they’re 508 million years old and incredibly well preserved. The most recognizable are the trilobites, but our group was more enamoured by the anomolocaris (replica pictured above on the left).

We had an hour to eat our lunch and freely explore in the quarry. Hundreds of thousands of fossils have been removed from the quarry and yet almost every single rock you look at has at least 1 fossil, if not dozens, on it. You can either walk through the quarry, examining larger fossils as you go, or you can sit down and get close up with all the unique little fossils. Our guide shared magnifying glasses and identification booklets and we all got lost back in time for an hour. Plus enjoy the pica that entertained me during my lunch pictured below!

We were incredibly lucky weather-wise. It was threatening rain on us all morning, which can make the fossils a bit hard to see and make the quarry quite slippery. But the rain held off until we were finally starting to pack up, and then we finished packing up in a hurry to slowly head back down. Apparently we were a bit faster than the average group, so we had a bit longer in the quarry and finished the entire hike in ~7 hours, but usually the guide allots for 8 hours to run the tour. She dropped us back at the visitor centre around 2pm.

We were all in awe the entire time and it was such a fun way to learn about natural history. I still have the guilt from going without Seth, but I can’t wait to return for Walcott Quarry. Unfortunately, it was Carolyn’s last day with us as she had to go back to work. She’d been planning to drive about halfway back to Vancouver, but with our early finish, she ending up powering the entire way back home that night. Me and Brandon enjoyed a delicious lunch at the Truffle Pig in Field instead and then returned to the Lake Louise campground to pack for our next adventure: Lake O’Hara!