First Class, or With Kids

Without my children, the Canadian Rockies would have been a quieter, and possibly more expansive trip, but I can’t imagine not taking them. On the whole, they’ve adapted well to the long drives, and enjoyed the destinations. Even if it didn’t always seem that way.

One of our first walks away from the car in Banff NP was at Johnston Creek, a fast-running river, really, through a steep canyon of its own making. The path is partly a standard trail beaten on the ground alongside the river. In other places, catwalks served as the trail, some of them nailed into the side of the canyon wall and overhanging a long drop into the angry current.

A fine walk, one featuring raw rock faces, clinging plants, tall trees, wildflowers, and a steady but not overwhelming flow of other walkers, since it’s one of the closer trails to Banff Townsite. For a while, Lilly and her mother were ahead of us on this trail—so I had Ann in tow, or rather she had me, since in places I wasn’t about to let her wander too much ahead or behind, especially on those catwalks. It would have taken some doing to go up and over the edge, but it could have been done.

Just above the creek’s Lower Falls, which are an intense rush of water into a circular pool below, Ann found what she’d been looking for along the trail, a supply of small rocks. Into the torrent they went, and while that was going on, she had no inclination to go near the edge, which was fenced anyway. I took it as an opportunity to relax, and for a while we both enjoyed the place. There’s no law, after all, that says that on a hike you have to keep going, going, going.

The Upper Falls are about a mile beyond the Lower, and en route to them, Ann went with her mother, and I accompanied Lilly. Though shaded by pines and other trees most of the time, it was hot, and she complained about that. Soon, she was complaining about the distance we had to walk – do we have to walk so far? Why are we walking so far? The sort of answers I tend to give, such as you can’t see much if you don’t walk, don’t really satisfy an eight-year-old, though with any luck the idea will be embedded somewhere so that when she’s older, she’ll feel the same way.

The path was moderately steep just ahead of the Upper Falls, and she started clinging to my arm, a serious annoyance. I told her not to pull on me like an anchor. She did it anyway, and was in full whine mode. Here we were, taking a fine foray into exceptional territory, and it was lost on her.

Until we got to the Upper Falls, that is. A towering waterfall spills from a cliff over a tall section of the canyon, seemly made even taller by the full-grown pines ringing the edge of the canyon like spectators. The human spectators can see the falls from an overhang of the catwalk, close enough that a bit of the roaring spray is a constant in your face. The whining stopping, the complaining evaporated. She stared at the falls and the canyon around them, wanted to take pictures, and wasn’t in a hurry to leave.