Finally, I reached the end of that trail, and turned my camera off. It was past 5pm at this point, and I went back to the hotel to pick up my backpack. I had conveniently planned my journey so that the ending point was near it. Near the hotel was an ice cream store that I had seen people lounging outside of a couple of days ago, staring at the mountain as they ate their own mountain of ice cream. I wanted to try this, and make a lasting imprint of a memory the same way that I’ve done so eating ice cream in Calgary, San Jose, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Kyoto twice (once in 2022 and once in 2023), Singapore, and gods know where else by this point. Anyway, Canmore is going on that list now. I had Chai and Toasty Coconut from this store for $7.51, and watched the cars go by amidst the majestic mountainous backdrop as I ate.

… wait, $7.51? The board clearly says $7.50. I got cheated!

I then left this area for the final time and went back downtown to the hotel, or rather hostel, that would house me for my third and last night in Canmore. The Canmore Hotel Hostel, a historically old lodging situated above a bar and it showed its age for sure, everything was kinda creaky and if you looked you could see paint flakes and misaligned doors and stuff everywhere.

Despite all that though, the place was surprisingly clean, even the large washroom and very narrow and cramped shared shower stalls in them were surprisingly clean minus a few hairs in one of the stalls. Although I did get a private room there for $85 instead of a shared dormitory so I cannot comment on the state of those. The kitchen and bathrooms were shared though, and the entire place was bustling with people young and old, cooking their own dinners and rushing to and fro from the washrooms and the kitchen and their own rooms. It was kind of like controlled chaos, there was no screaming and hijinks in sight and the dormitory staff were also often seen around the place, checking things out, checking people in, doing laundry, cleaning the premises, etc.

This was what my room looked like:

The fridge next to my bed was actually really nice to chill my water. Apparently drinking water there was just meant to be harvested from the sink, which had a filter thing on it, but I didn’t trust it at first, so what I did is that I used the teacup from Jolene’s Tea House that I bought yesterday, filled that with hot water from the water kettle, and then stuffed that hot water into the fridge until it cooled off. And then I could pour it into my plastic water bottles without scalding myself. Talking about which, I forgot to add a story about the Jolene’s Tea House visit to yesterday’s blog, but have now rectified that.

Anyway, why didn’t I just let the water cool off in the kettle and then use that, you say? Well, that’s a function of the shared kitchen looking like this for most of the evening:

The water in the flask never survived that long. Eventually though I did try the tap water and it was actually perfectly fine to drink, so I did that instead.

Also, there was a nice messageboard in the hostel that I took a picture of. I love chronicling things like this.

Once I was done my shower and a bit of doodling on my laptop, it was around 8:15 pm. My stargazing tour didn’t start until 10pm, and I figured I should grab some dinner first. Staying at the hostel apparently entitled us to a 10% discount at the bar beneath it (as well as a nearby cannabis store), and they had bison burger on the menu, so that’s what I did for dinner. I think this was the first time I’ve been to a bar alone for dinner, especially during a game night as the Edmonton Oilers were playing the Dallas Stars on the many TV screens.

I came in halfway through the third period when the score was 2-1 already, and the Oilers eventually won 4-1 on the two empty netter goals. A couple of girls who were watching at the bar hooted and banged on one of the wall pillars at the 3-1 and 4-1 goals. Most of the guys in the bar were playing billards with each other and more or less ignoring the game. One of them complimented my shirt, the Team Spica one I had picked up from Singapore on a whim a few years ago. He liked the stripe going up the back of my shirt and ran a finger down my back where the stripe was, which come to think of it now might have been a little forward, but we had been chatting a little bit by that point anyway. He asked where it was from but I wasn’t going to tell him that it was a Tampines Secondary School P.E. shirt. I’m not even sure how I could have explained that to him properly anyway, especially since it wasn’t a school I actually attended.

Anyway, after dinner, I went back to the hotel room, changed into warmer clothes, and went to that stargazing tour!

The tour was scheduled to run from 10pm to 2am, with pickup in Canmore and then Banff half an hour later, and then a trip to Lake Minnewanka in the darkness, and then the return back to our hotels in the reverse order. The tour company was called Into The Wild Tours (local), and this was their last Lake Minnewanka stargazing tour of the season, because from June onwards they apparently do a Moraine Lake one instead. Which would be cool, but I’ve been there before anyway. But not Lake Minnewanka, which apparently means Spirit Lake, until now.

Our tour guide was Pablo, and he was great. There were 9 guests on our tour, but I was the only one staying at Canmore, so I got some alone time to chat with him as we drove over to Banff at the onset of the tour, and after we delivered the guests back to Banff at the end of the tour. Apparently he used to stay at the Canmore Hotel Hostel for two weeks too, when he first came over to Canmore and started working here, before he could get a place to rent. He’d also been doing this tour for two years, with well over a hundred runs at this point, and he had seen a lot of wildlife on the road, because they apparently get very active at night, but had never run into one while on foot at the sites, due to precautions like making lights and noise and travelling in groups. Apparently we saw two bear cubs and a couple of elks while travelling but I never saw them myself from my position in the coach van. Oh well. He regaled us with plenty of stories and advice about the region as the coach van trundled on to the lake.

At the camp site, Pablo assuaged people who had bear worries by saying that there’s never been a bear attack incident with a travelling group size of four or more, and we had ten. He also gave everyone headlamps, and a warm tumbler of Jolene’s Tea House tea, and had hand warmers as well if people were cold. He took us through the darkness to a spot by the edge of the lake, then we turned off our headlamps and stared at the starry skies above as her set up a monocular telescope. There was no moon nor any planets to stare at though, just a ton of stars, and later on, some Northern Lights as well, though those were not really visible with the naked eye except for a faint light glow on the horizon.

They turned out well on the phone though, and he went around checking people’s phone settings and helping them figure out the best tweaks to get better night pictures. For my Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, he showed me that the “automatic” exposure time for night photos was 6 seconds, and that I could manually turn it higher, although higher was still only 9 seconds and you had to set it after each photo with no way to set a default timer, apparently. There’s probably ways to do it better in the camera’s Pro mode, but I’ve never played around with that and have no idea how to use it yet.

For now though, what I had was sufficient for some pictures. Although really nothing beat being there in person — except for the mountain silhouette and aurora shots, which were nice, all the star shots were just white dots on a black canvas, and even then a lot of the fainter stars just did not show up. The weather was clear, and it was great to be able to look up and see stars everywhere. It was GLORIOUS. Several people had the Star Walk 2 app too, which I have both used and recommended to others in the past as well, so it was nice to see that I wasn’t alone in finding it to be a great resource for identifying constellations and other oddities in the sky.

We also saw a number of satellites go by, and the Star Walk app noted that there was an area in the sky near the Bootes constellation that we could watch for meteors from the Tau Herculids meteor shower, but they’re so hard to see that I think I saw one or two but might have been completely mistaken. I think I saw one early on though but just hurt my neck for the rest of the night trying to see more.

Regarding the Northern Lights, Pablo thought at first that there would only be a low chance of them appearing — apparently there were actually pretty strong ones during the day but the Kp value, which measures geomagnetic activity and thus aurora chance, was not particularly high that night. However, I knew from the University of Alberta‘s Aurorawatch mailing list that there was a yellow alert/medium chance of them before we started the tour, and it upgraded to a red alert once we were on the tour, so I was unreasonably optimistic anyway even though we were fairly far south comparatively speaking. Pablo had a big laser that he pointed into the sky, showing us the lights from Calgary and Canmore polluting the horizon, as well as pointing out some satellites and planes and such. It was really nice to see that laser at work on a night sky. And eventually he used it to point out the aurora glow as well when that appeared, and suggested we pointed our cameras that way.

There was one final note that I remember for now and wanted to add too. He said that we were one day removed from a full moon that evening and depending on what one was after, that could either be a good or a bad thing — the moon itself is very majestic at night and lights up the entire night landscape, which itself is a sight to behold, but she also drowns out the surrounding stars and makes them invisible. So depending on what sort of scene one preferred, there were different reasons to either pick a tour that coincided with a fuller moon or a newer moon. I did not look this up at all before booking, nor was I consciously aware that this was a factor, so I’m glad I serendipitously lucked into a new moon one.

Anyway, pictures. I took dozens, but many were very similar. So here’s a few selected ones.

Anyway, this was a very long day, and since it finished at 2am, and I took another quick shower after reaching back to the hostel, it took even longer to write up. I’m now behind a day or so in my chronicles, but the next few days are more laid back days and we’ll see how quickly I can catch up!