Driving through the spring snowstorm west of Calgary, we were concerned that we would have a wet hike with little in terms of views, but we were wrong! As we neared Banff, patches of blue sky and sunlit mountainsides started to appear.

There was a few inches of new snow in the Johnson Canyon parking lot, so most of us decided to don our snowshoes right away. It was snowing lightly on and off most of the way up the canyon, with the occasional sunny break. The canyon and its ice curtains were very pretty, and there weren’t many other people on the trail as we ascended. Once we passed the lower falls, the skies cleared and we had mostly sunny skies for the remainder of the day, and very nice views from the Ink Pots, where we had our lunch.

Lunch at Ink Pots

One of the Ink Pots

We returned via Moose Meadows trail, which had had less travel on it, and broke trail through an off-trail cutoff. In the sunny areas of this part of our trip, we had some clumping on our snowshoes, but no problem in the cooler snow in shaded areas. We walked back from Moose Meadows to our vehicle in the Johnson Canyon parking lot along the now-plowed highway 1A – if we had had enough people to justify more than one vehicle, we could have done a car shuttle to avoid this 1.5 km less scenic walk.

The only wildlife we sighted was a large herd of Elk in the area of the old Buffalo Paddock on our drive home.

Thanks to Jennifer for coordinating this trip from Teresa (p), Janice, and Barb (p,s)

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