Banff Springs Hotel

Doretha and Linda were very interested in doing a tour of the luxury hotel, the Fairmont Banff Spring Hotel.

We went through this roundabout to find some paid parking close to the hotel. We had an interesting experience meeting a car going the opposite direction on a presumably one way roundabout.

This guy, William Cornelius Van Horne, was the driving force behind establishing resort hotels owned and operated by Canadian Pacific Railroad.

The hotel was designed in a Scottish baronial style.

Here is one of the accommodation wings.

Hotels move with the times. Now they stache snowboards as well as other sporting gear.

Linda and Doretha get ready to into the main lobby.

Concierges to the right.

Here’s ours. We bought our tickets for the tour at $15 per gawker.

Their motto: always the same

Here is a nice chandelier.

Here are a couple of posers on a grand staircase.

There is another expensive light fitting on the next floor.

And another.

There is even a fancy logo on the gents.

 

Well, here is our guide. Apparently, he is the hotel’s official historian. He seemed to spend a more time dropping names of guests that he had come into contact with than talking about the history of the hotel. But at least we had access to various rooms that were not usually open to the public. However, it is worth noting that we didn’t get to sight any accommodation.

 

The windows were specifically designed to fit into the scheme of an old Scottish castle, even to the extent of installing narrow defendable slit windows.

Needless to say, since the railroad had first choice of building sites, the views were magnificent.

 

Another view of note was probably not on the schedule. I hope these people had plenty of mosquito repellent, as the mosquitoes were quite fierce in Banff because of extended hot weather combined with unseasonal heavy rain.

They even had a croquet court, albeit set up for U.S. rules

There were nice flower displays everywhere.

These look like old fashioned luggage carts.

 

This room was very popular for weddings and the like:

 

 

There were also some nice stained glass in this room.

We are given more info as we wind through some dark passageways:

We make our way through a fancy dining area.

Intermittently used ballroom.

Conservatory.

The tour is over, but who can resist making friends with a Scottish knight.

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Lake Winnewanka

The longest lake in the Canadian Rockies is Lake Winnewanka. It is man made (dam on the Western end) but glacier fed. We made a morning visit to this lake that was a convenient 5 km NE of Banff.

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Even the parking lot backdrop was rather spectacular.

It is good to know which way to go.

The washrooms were rather interesting. For one thing, they were partly solar powered.

In the ladies there were a number of posters:

Outside of the washroom building there was a garden of  Inukshuks.

Here are some examples.

 

We are finally at the entrance trail to the lake.

The ancients believed the lake was inhabited by spirits.

This pier led to the mooring areas for lake tours and guided fishing trips.

Here is a better photo of the backdrop mountain.

It is difficult to describe in words the natural beauty of this lake. Possibly a few pictures will suffice:

 

 

It was also the right season for wildflowers:

   

I even found this songbird:

 

We ran into a marina (associated with the lodge I think) as we went on our shoreline walk.

The lake water was pretty clear.

Chuck and I walked until came across an inlet stream. We walked for a while along the banks of the stream but found neither a bridge or a clear photo opportunity of the stream.

 

We did run across a couple of rather nice picnic spots on the walk.

This just shows we were there.

  

Here is a video containing a couple of Linda’s clips:

 

Technorati Tags: Banff,Lake Winnewanka