A 'bucket list' drive: Bow Valley Parkway

In an earlier post I shared a link to an article listing five great Canadian roads you need to drive one day. One of those drives was the Bow Valley Parkway in Banff National Park. Here's a quote from that article on www.driving.ca that sums it up better than I can...

"Winding between Banff and Lake Louise inside Banff National Park, the Bow Valley Parkway (Highway 1A) is a remnant of a different time in Canadian motoring. The Parkway was built to be an enjoyable route to the glamorous Chateau Lake Louise hotel some 85 years ago. Today, it serves as a scenic alternative to the bustling TransCanada. The road actually splits the eastbound and westbound lanes at several different points for no apparent reason other than to send drivers along different curving paths. These “one lane” sections are delightfully twisty and fun." (Link to full article above)

My wife Sharon and I were on a mini vacation in the Banff/Canmore area and decided to drive the Parkway on a rather cool and damp afternoon. We took highway 1 west from Banff, past the eastern access to the Parkway to the western end at Lake Louise.

Approaching the eastern access to the Bow Valley Parkway.

Westbound on the Trans-Canada Highway Weather starts to close in near Castle Mountain.

 

Bow Valley Parkway entry sign

Me and the Festiva at the west entrance to the Bow Valley Parkway.

There are a number of spots along the way with exhibits of one sort or another. We chose to stop at Johnston Canyon and save the rest for a day trip of their own. Johnston Canyon is a short distance east of the mid point of the Parkway. It's a popular tourist stop during the summer with the parking lot overflowing and large crowds up and down the trail. Being off-season, mid-week and with iffy weather we found a parking spot very close to the beginning of the trail and very few people around. 

Some straight bits...

 

Some curvy bits...

The Parkway has a split personality....

Two lanes rejoin.

Johnston Canyon is a beautiful spot. If you plan to go on a weekend and especially during high season we would recommend that you either get there early, before 10:00am, or later in the day, say after 4:00pm. That way you should miss the bulk of the tour busses that have this as part of their itinerary.

One of many catwalks on the way up the canyon

Upper falls in Johnston Canyon, May 7, 2015

On the way down.

A beautiful afternoon for a stroll in the mountains....

A little bit east of Johnston Canyon you will find a gate! From this point to the eastern portal the Parkway is only open from 08:00 until 20:00. There is a major wildlife corridor in the area so the closure, along with the low 60kph speed limit, was implemented to reduce animal/car collisions.

Grazing elk spotted in a meadow just east of Johnston Canyon.

The weather co-operated while we did the hike to the upper falls in the canyon, with a little bit of sunshine and very little precipitation. Once we left the parking lot we ran into quite a bit of rain so didn't get a lot of photos. This trip down the Parkway reinforces my opinion that you don't have to go fast to thoroughly enjoy a drive.

Tree in the way? No problem, we'll just split the lanes around it!

So there you have it. One drive off the bucket list. We'll be trying to fit in a couple of close drives listed in the linked article over the summer.  For our Alberta and British Columbia readers please be sure to let us know what your favorite drive is. I'm hoping to put together a list of reasonably local drives, perhaps something that could be done as a day trip.

Thanks to Sharon for taking the photos. 

Flashback!!! Compact Imports at the 1987 Chicago Auto Show... is this the beginning of the econobox era?

This video has popped up on Facebook and other social media just recently. It's a flashback to the early days of the 'econobox' era. 

The title of this video refers to compact imports yet there's several domestic manufacturers shown. 

The '88 Mercury Tracer  was a rebadged version of the Ford Laser model already sold in Asia and Australia, which was itself a restyled Mazda 323.The '88 Pontiac LeMans was manufactured by Daewoo and the '88 Mitsubishi Precis was a rebadged Hyundai. To top that off, the Ford Festiva was engineered by Mazda and manufactured by Kia. Mazda is Japanese; Daewoo, Hyundai and Kia were all based in South Korea.



I noticed that the Ford Festiva was presented as being equipped with a 1.1 litre engine with a 1.3 litre as an option. Although the smaller engine was available in other markets the larger, 1.3 litre, was the engine that came as the standard in North America. 

Not all of the cars in the video are what I would consider an econobox though. The LeMans is borderline and the VW Fox isn't really a "box". 

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below.

Earliest road trip memories

I recently came across a couple of photos of one of my early cars. This was my second car and the  first I ever bought from a dealer. It was 1975 and I paid $400 for it. Can't remember how many miles were on it at the time but I do recall it needed a new windshield and within a couple of months of ownership I had to replace the brakes.

Even back then I couldn't leave things stock. I wanted to up the performance a bit so I installed a Mr. Gasket dual point distributor and a carburetor from a '69. The choke had to be converted to the '59's 6 volt system from the '69's 12 volt. I purchased an AM/FM radio and a voltage converter to go with it. Other modifications were the custom steering wheel and interior door panels. I also started on painting the stock steel wheels to resemble the then popular Jackman 5 spoke steel wheels.

The reason I'm sharing this is that the photos reminded me of my first road trip! I had only had my driver's license for a couple of years and hadn't ventured much more that two or three hundred kilometers from home. Friends had recently moved from Calgary to Campbell River BC, which is located on Vancouver Island, and had extended an invitation to come and visit. That was the seed for my first solo road trip.

There was no gas gauge in the early Beetles so planning for the trip was based on an estimated fuel consumption and how far I thought I could get without risking running out of gas. It turned out that my initial estimates were very conservative. My route took me west from Calgary along the Trans-Canada highway through Banff with the first scheduled fuel stop in Golden BC, 265km / 164 miles away. I only needed 18 litres / 4 imperial gallons of gas which netted me 40 miles per gallon. This turned out to be the average for the whole trip, 1600 miles and 40 gallons of gas.

The Coquihalla Highway was still 10 years from being opened so my route followed the Trans Canada Highway through Fraser Canyon. I remember the exhaust developing a leak somewhere after Kamloops BC. In those days oil came in cans so I stopped at a gas station, asked for an empty can, purchased  a couple of clamps and had my exhaust quieted down in no time.

Stopped at a campsite near Hope BC overnight planning an early start the next morning. Made it to Vancouver in time for the noon ferry across to Nanaimo BC and then headed up to Campbell River from there. 

The trip was a lot of fun and other than the exhaust patch I had no problems with the car. I didn't run out of gas either! I showed the pictures to the family the other day and one of the first things they said is that I should have kept the car! Perhaps they were right.

Do you remember your first road trip? Please share it by commenting below.

We've been everywhere... an update

I don't want to leave out the Canadian portions of our road trips so here's a map showing the provinces we've been in during the same time frame of our earlier post:

Provinces we've visited in the Festiva marked in yellow

Although over the years we've been in more than what's shown I've only included those provinces that we've been in with the Festiva.We hope to increase the yellow bits on both maps during 2015!

We've been everywhere... well not quite

I was just going over some of our blog posts and thought it would be fun to map out the states we have been through in the Festiva so here it is...

The states marked in yellow are the ones we've driven through since September of 2011 on our "Festiva Madness" and "Festiva in the Park" road trips. Final tally is 25 states plus Washington DC as of November 15, 2014. Those two road trips totaled over 18,000km / 11,000 miles spread over 29 days. Follow the links to the first post in each of those trips.

Your comments are welcome.

Not every road is a winding road.

Most of the road trips and favorite drives I've written about in the past have featured twisty two lane hardtop highways winding their way through mountain and forest. In fact there are some great drives that fit that description only an hour west of our home here in Calgary. 


The picture is considerably different an hour in the opposite direction. When you drive east from here the roads straighten out considerably and the vistas are long and broad. Although my preference is for the twisty bits there's something appealing about the long view too. The following photos were taken on the westward drive from Salem Acres Bible Camp, just west of Big Valley AB, to Innisfail AB along Alberta Highway 590.

This stretch of highway is about as straight as you can get as it rolls across the prairies and is a fairly typical example of the roads to be found across the eastern half of our province.

WESTIVA 2014... more photos

Here are a few more photos from the Westiva meet held last month. Enjoy...

Promised engine shot of Casey's 1.0L 3 cylinder turbo

Casey's Swift

Brad's Festiva in its current trim.

Upper Kananaskis Lake where we dipped our toes in the water.

On the road up to Boulton Creek Trading Post.

Thanks to Wilf and Brad for sending these. 


Brad also posted a little video of the drive from Wedge Pond up to the Boulton Creek Trading Post....

Thanks again to everyone who made it out. See you again next year, July11!