Good morning ladies and gentlemen, Vagabuddies.
Greetings from Jasper Alberta, Cananda
We just finished Buffer Festival in Toronto,
and we are with the lovely Carrie Rad.
Hello.
And three of us are going to go through what's known as the Icefields Parkways,
which is from Jasper all the way down through Banff here in the Canadian Rockies in Alberta.
First stop:
We're hopping in our frosty car,
and we are heading up to Maligne Lake,
which is home to the famous Spirit Island. So let's hit it.
We've made it to Maligne Lake.
I don't know if it's mal aligned or malignee.
Regardless of how you pronounce it,
it's really beautiful, and we're going to be hopping on a boat,
take a cruise up the lake.
Got the Rockies covered in snow back there.
Lots of trees changing colors and
yeah, it's going to be pretty awesome.
The sun feels pretty nice right about now.
Is it chilly?
It's definitely chilly,
but this sun feels really good right now,
and you can see my breath, which I like.
I feel a little snug. I like being cold right now.
We just took a 30 minute boat cruise across Maligne Lake to Spirit Island,
which is not actually an island... only when the snow melts in the beginning season and the water levels rise.
But normally it's a peninsula.
This place called Maligne Lake, but originally in the local indigenous names
the stunning Dakota tribe called it the Great Beaver Lake.
It's called Maligne Lake, which is French for cursed or bad luck lake because an
early French explorer tipped his canoe and lost all of his his stuff.
This is a beautiful place, extremely serene
It's extremely remote.
You know, there's really only a couple ways to get here,
but it's also extremely popular,
especially with a lot of tourists here from Asia.
And the reason is..........
this place here is not only a beautiful spiritual spot,
but it's an excellent place to take a selfie.
Run.
Okay, so our 15 minutes are officially up.
They're blowing the horn on the boat.
People are yelling in Mandarin.
I think it's time to go.
Mission to Spirit Island completed.
Learned the story about it.
The reason that so famous is because it was
originally captured as part of some of the first color photos ever developed by Kodak
and put in Grand Central Station in New York
in 1960 which caused a huge amount of interest in it.
And that kind of illustrates the way that sometimes places,
certain places have been captured in media,
especially today on Instagram, can become
legendary online or by word of mouth.
And then sometimes when you get there, there's so much hype
that you don't know or it's it's harder for it to live up to what you've seen in a very edited, polish way.
I think......Is that the case here?
I don't know. I think that Photoshop is a real thing.
It's beautiful here,
but I think the lesson is at the end of day,
it's not about going to a specific spot so much as it is
about how that photo represents the beauty of the Rockies.
Maybe we should adjust our mission.
Instead of going to specific Instagram spots,
we should try to put experiencing this place first
and capturing it second.
Let's get lost in the Rockies this weekend.
My goal is to relax, get good photos, enjoy myself, and
yeah, not take it too seriously.
It's the last morning here in Jasper.
We're going to get some breakfast, grab some fishing licenses,
which we need to do for later in the trip,
and then we're going to hop back onto the Icefield Parkway
and head to Lake Louise.
All right. Well we've pulled over.
We're on the Icefields Parkway in between Jasper and Banff.
The distances here are immense,
but the scenery is incredible and every curve of the road is some new
beautiful, timeless, mountain landscape.
It's incredible; truly one of the places where the journey is the destination.
There is nowhere in particular that we're stopping,
but if you drive, every single view out
the window is like a rolling Imax movie.
So it's kind of like... this is the great time of year to go because
the colors are changing with fall, and
I'm sure this is really beautiful winter.
I'm sure it's really beautiful in summer.
Right now we're here in October
It's some of the lowest tourism of the whole year.
So we do really have a lot of this place to ourselves,
and you see the beautiful color of the water here.
Overall it's a nice place to stop and smell the roses.
I don't think there're any roses here,
but it's a nice place to stop and smell the pines, the birch,
deciduous forest, deciduous forests in North America.
Here we've gotten out of the car.
There's a beautiful lake in front of us,
and everyone's taking selfies, which means one thing.
We are at Lake Louise
What's happening?
We're taking a photo in front of Lake Louise
because it's beautiful and the water is turquoise and stunning.
I just turned this into a musical.
Lake Louise is extremely beautiful.
It's basically this big glacier with a lake and a chateau,
Fairmont Hotel right on top of it,
and it's definitely like Spirit Island has been made very popular by Instagram
with the red canoes being extremely iconic.
We are far from the first people to have the idea of going canoeing here on Lake Louise,
but none the less, we're going to jump into two canoes and
get ourselves out on the water because it's a beautiful day.
We're on the water.
Alex and Carrie are in their own canoe.
I'm in mine because
as I've always said
One of the best traveler mottos is: Love all. Trust view,
and always paddle your own canoe.
The point being, we're still trekking.
The water here is beautiful.
It's like this aquamarine.
This color is just insane.
It comes from the glacial runoff,
the grinding of rocks which puts sediment in the water.
I think it's a color that is distinctly
unique and looks great in photos against the red canoe.
Well that settles it.
We have Instagrams for the next month, two months, a couple of years.
But our time at Lake Louise is over,
and we're going to pile back in the car and head towards Banff.
Banff. It stands for baths and natural fun forever.
What that means is that there are hot springs in Banff,
which I'm super stoked on. I believe the natural hot springs
are right in front of the Fairmont Hotel where we're staying
and generally just feeling stoked.
Canadian Rockies, beautiful place.
Blessing to be here.
Having a good time. Let's go eat some dinner.
Ladies and gents,
it's 625 in the morning.
We got up at 5:50am.
Reason we are up so early is because
fish eat early, and we have to drive all the way down to Calgary right now,
which is about an hour and a half because we are going to go on a
fly-fishing float trip down the Bow River,
which is one of the premier
trout fishing rivers in the world, and
It's going to be awesome.
I'm really excited, but we have a drive. So let's go.
This is Mark. Good morning. Good morning. High five, dude.
You're going to be our boat guide, fly- guide.
What do we have in store for us today?
Well, we've got a beautiful river.
Yeah, that is a guarantee. Nice.
And we're going to float down and hopefully run into some fish.
Awesome. Let's see what happens.
Come on. There he goes.
We're taking a little break, switching out flies.
Carrie has caught two fish already, and I am still waiting.
But this is all about patience.
We've been fishing for a couple of hours,
and it's officially time to eat.
We're underneath some cottonwood trees, and
it's very quintessential fall.
They're all orange and yellow leaved,
and they're all starting to come off now.
It's kind of a bittersweet beauty, you know.
It's the end of a season and the beginning of the next one.
It's all part of the cycle of life.
I'm eating your chips by the river. My favorite.
Nice little spread... cookies, obviously.
Sandwiches have been had, potato salad.
Mark's all over it.
That was awesome.
So rad. Thank you Mark. Really appreciate that.
Thank you guys. It was a great day.
That was dope.
Did you have fun Carrie?
So much fun.
I'm just happy I caught some fish.
You caught like five fish. What are you talking about?
Three, four? Four.
Well ladies and gentlemen, that is the end of our quick little tour of Alberta.
The Icefields Parkway was insane.
So beautiful. So many incredible places to stop.
And I think we need to come back and continue exploring.
Autumn was a great time to come here.
All the colors have been changing in the forest, and I want to come back in the
winter time because this is also some of the best snowboarding, skiing in the world.
Anyways guys, if you guys like this video, give a big thumbs- up,
share with your friends, subscribe to Vagabrothers, and don't forget to turn
on notifications, if you have not already.
Big thanks to Destination Canada and Travel Alberta for bringing us out here.
Also huge thanks to Buffer Festival for bringing us to Canada to showcase our short film.
Thank you all for watching.
If you have not already, make sure that you go subscribe to the lovely Carrie Rad.
She's been an awesome travel buddy on this trip,
and her link is down in the info box.
Peace.