In my short lifetime thus far, I feel that I’ve been blessed to see some incredibly magical places in this world. Venice, Paris, the Lauterbrunnen valley, Tuscany…but stepping off the bus into the early morning mist of Lake O’Hara has to be one of the most magical. We had heard about this place for awhile, but found out you had to reserve a seat on the bus to take you up the 11km access road, SIX MONTHS in advance. And only 40 people a day can be at the lake. So, exactly 6 months in advance we called, and called, and called. According to my phone records we hit redial 1900 times until we finally got through. THAT is how hard it is to get to this place. There are some insanely dedicated hikers in the world! The area around the lake is all carefully protected and is even home to rare mountain orchids – it’s like stepping into a fairy tale with the mossy ground and mushrooms and waterfalls and the clearest emerald lake you’ve ever seen. One of my knees was giving me a rough go of it from all the hiking the day before but we weren’t going to miss out on this so up we went for several miles into more beautiful alpine views. We had lunch and took a nap by the lake and contemplated how cold we would be if we went for a swim – hypothermic was the conclusion.

We had planned to stay in Yoho National Park in the town of Field, but there was a mixup with our guesthouse so we ended up back in Banff at our original hotel which we LOVE – the Caribou Lodge. Almost every morning and night we would go out driving on the little roads, looking for wildlife. It was high season for berries, so grizzlies were being spotted EVERYWHERE and Brandon & Joel were determined to see one. So out we went for an hour drive and while we never did see a grizzly on this trip, we did see this majestic male elk. He was huge! It’s so fun in Canada to find wildlife because once you do – every car behind you stops to see what animals are around. When we were doing a photoshoot in a field, a guy stopped quickly, jumped out of the car and ran up to us asking where the animals were that we were photographing. Sorry, just people this time! 🙂