Our first difficulty of today was getting up at around 5:30am. Carol got up at this time while I took another 15 minutes. We did a quick remote checkout and hop in the car and went straight to Lake Louis. The idea is to get there before 7am so that we can park right at the lake.
Mission accomplished! We managed to park at the lower parking lot by the lake. Did the mandatory touristy thing by taking selfies and pictures around the lake and decided to hike up to Mirror Lake which is about 2.5km of incline hiking. We did not have it in us to keep on going to Lake Agnes, as that is another 800m. These are one way distances so we have to double distances for our round trip. All in all we did a 6km hike today.
Below are some pictures from Lake Louis, you can click the picture to show the full size.
The drive North on Hwy 93 was very picturesque! The sun came out in the second half of our drive. We stopped once at one of the lookout stops, but Carol mostly took videos while in the car. We passed the glass floor bridge, because our impression was it was super small and not worth our while.
We ended up in Jasper just in time to charge back our Tesla to 80% and have lunch, which we did at the Mad Grizzly on Patricia Street. Once again the food was okay, but we were hungry.
If we were to do it again, we would probably skip Banff and travel from Calgary, with a 5am departure and go direct to Lake Louis, with a quick charge in Canmore, and on the same day go straight to Jasper. There was a non-Tesla charger station mid-route from Lake Louis to Jasper, which we could have topped up with our CCS adapter.
I am super tired now and the rest of today will be vegging-out in the hotel room. Tomorrow we plan to do another hike in the area and off to West Edmonton Mall.
Here is Carol’s video for the day.