Jilted Jaunts Series - Table of Contents
Entry | Notable Places/Events | Start of Day | End of Day |
---|---|---|---|
Day 0 - May 22-24 2025 | Introduction, Planning | - | - |
Day 1 - May 25 2025 | Edmonton > Calgary > Canmore | Edmonton | Canmore |
Day 2 - May 26 2025 | Banff, Tunnel Mountain | Canmore | Canmore |
Day 3 - May 27 2025 | Three Sisters Pathway, Canmore, Lake Minnewanka stargazing | Canmore | Canmore |
Day 4 - May 28 2025 | Canmore > Calgary | Canmore | Calgary |
Day 5 - May 29 2025 | Calgary > Vancouver, Crystal Mall, Aberdeen Square, Aberdeen Centre | Calgary | Vancouver |
Day 6 - May 30 2025 | Parker Place, Main Street, Chinatown, Gastown, Shipyards Night Market | Vancouver | Vancouver |
Day 7 - May 31 2025 | Richmond Public Market, Vancouver Aquarium, Richmond Night Market | Vancouver | Vancouver Airport |
Day 8 - May 31 2025 | Vancouver > Calgary > Edmonton, Vancouver Airport, Lilac Festival | Vancouver Airport | Edmonton |
Tuesday, May 27 2025 (Day 3)
I checked out of my hotel room around 11 am today, despite still having one more day in Canmore to go — my last night was going to be at a different hotel as the room I had originally booked at the first hotel, Mountain View Inn, had only been available for two days. The second place I booked was a private room at the Canmore Hotel Hostel, a bustling and possibly noisy place in the middle of downtown, which also meant that it was comparatively really cheap, clocking in at something like $85. Also, I had a stargazing tour planned for overnight, so I wouldn’t be in that room for very long anyway even if it was noisy. In theory!
But first, back to the start of the day we go. I checked out of my hotel, Mountain View Inn, at 11 am. My checkin at Canmore Hotel Hostel wasn’t until at least 4 pm, so I asked the staff at Mountain View if I could leave my backpack there and pick it up later in the afternoon. They said yes, so I took them up on that offer, yay!
I then walked over to the little downtown core to have breakfast. I was contempiating a couple of places serving eggs benedict, but in the end I found a store called Graze Food & Drink that was selling a breakfast dish called shakshuka, described as a North African delicacy with eggs in a tomato-based sauce, and served with bread, potatoes, and fruit. That sure sounded interesting, so I went for that.
It wasn’t the best meal I’ve ever had or anything, but it wasn’t bad. I think a different blend of tomato and spices would have been better. It was a little too.. sweet? Sour? Tomatoey. I watched a rerun of yesterday’s Florida-Carolina NHL game on the screen while I supped.
After breakfast, I took a free shuttle bus, the Canmore local bus route 5T, out of town and down south to the Three Sisters Parkway (Dyrgas) stop. My legs were all sore from the various treks over the past two days, so naturally today I just wanted kick back and… do my longest trek yet. This was only possible because I could leave my backpack back at the hotel, so I can directly thank my first hotel for this, but the reason I wanted to do this trek was that this was supposedly the only (well, the only one I found/learnt about anyway) trek in the Banff/Canmore area that had lots of meadows and fields instead of just forest treks and mountain hikes, both of which I find kind of samey after a bit. Meadow/field hikes were why I was so tempted to go to England and hike there in the first place.
This trek I was targetting was called the Three Sisters Pathway, and it was amazing. The center meadow part specifically, centered around a slightly pungent pond and a huge, rolling meadow situated between some picturesque houses and a river. It was screamingly beautiful, or at least that was the adjective that came to my mind in the moment. I also then tacked on two extra trails going around and then through Canmore at the end of the Three Sisters Pathway, adding so much extra distance that Pikmin Bloom apparently said that I set a new steps record today with 28,570 steps for the entire day. The second trail was the Bow River (outer) loop, going from the Canmore Pedestrian Bridge where the Three Sisters Pathway ended for me, to the Canmore Engine bridge. A little past that was the Policeman’s Creek Boardwalk Trail, and I walked that route through the town as well. My trekking map more or less looked like this today, with A-B being the Three Sisters Pathway, B-C being Bow River Loop plus a little extra, and C-D being the Policeman’s Creek one.
This took me nearly 5 hours, and I actually recorded the entire thing on video too, at 4k/30 fps on my new DJI Osmo Pocket 3. There are two problems with this though. The first is that there’s no way to process the raw video at least until I get home, so it will be a while until I can get it up onto this page. The second is that I did not realize that the very sensitive microphone picked up the swishing of my sling bag against my clothing or something, and even though I could not really hear it while walking in the moment, the steady swish-swish noise permeates basically the entire video whenever I moved. Accidental ASMR? I wish there were a way to just remove the sound without affecting anything else, but I’m still nonetheless going to post the video once it is processed. I didn’t narrate the walk at all, so maybe people can just mute it if they find it annoying. The video will be posted here, and also on the weekly blog page of whatever week I finish processing it on.
In the meantime, enjoy a placeholder.
I did take a lot of pictures anyway but don’t want to inundate the page with similar looking pictures so I’m limiting myself as to how many of each section I upload. Two or three, plus a small gallery of four or eight.
The starting section of my hike was a roundabout circle near the Three Sisters Mountain Village. The traffic circle area was very scenic.
I went through some forested paths, then some areas that seem to have recently undergone some controlled explosions, then a detour that took me through a sinister-looking lakeside area.
I then reached the meadows area of the trek and this was amazing, by far and away the best scene I’d seen all trip, maybe across any trip that I’ve ever made. There was a slightly pungent Sulphur Pond in the middle of the meadow that apparently was natural made too but the faint whiff was only detectable from right up against the pond. This entire area was just so windswept and so, so very nice. Screamingly nice.
So pretty. I wonder what it would cost to stay in one of those houses. Food upkeep is probably way too high though. And I wonder how slow delivery of online purchases would be. But still, with that meadow in my backyard? I’d give up a lot of things for it.
After this segment, the trail wound its way past more riverside forest and grassland until it reached the Canmore Pedestrian Bridge. This next set of pictures is from this segment.
I could have gone back into downtown Canmore from the Canmore Pedestrian Bridge, but I wasn’t quite satiated yet, and one of the “easy” trails around Canmore that connected its two bridges started from there, so I went around that way instead. That destination bridge, called the Canmore Engine Bridge, apparently featured in the TV series of The Last Of Us. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never seen it, and apparently I thought so little of it that I didn’t even take a picture of it, except from afar. It’s in the video though.
Past all that was a few residential streets and park edges that I had to cross to get to the nearby start of the third trail, Policeman’s Creek Boardwalk. I passed by a field where a bunch of kids were participating in soccer practice under the looming shadow of the mountains. The world felt so very right and cozy in a way that I’m not sure the English language has a way of describing.
The Policeman’s Creek trail was a combination of in-town forest trails and dirt roads, though at one point it also crossed over a marshy area with a wooden boardwalk. Because this trail went through the town, it passed by lots of residential houses too.
Thankfully my insect repellent was still going strong, as there were lots of small bugs around this trail especially. I didn’t get bit one single time that I know of through the entire day (and trip so far) though.
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!
On the way back, we also messed around a bit by where our bus was parked, taking night pictures of this and that even though there were bright lights in the parking lot area too for nearby campers. Some of those pictures turned out decent.
When I arrived back at the hostel, one last surprise awaited me as well, besides the free chocolate that Pablo gave every participant as they got out. I knew that some nights the Canmore Hotel Hostel had events all the way until 3am, so I had assumed that there would still be people around Canmore Main Street at 1:45 am. Nope, it was deathly silent. All the residents were indoors and their doors were barred as protection against the roaming werewolves and werebears or something. It was super liminal!