Here’s another little glimpse of camp life. Most of the campgrounds where we stayed had warnings posted for Grizzly Bears, Mountain Lions, and way up north in Lake Louise, also for Elk, due to calving season. But at Lake Louise, they were really serious about the Grizzlies. The entire campground was fenced off with an electrified fence which you can see in the first photo. They even had a cattle guard gate to drive over which had electrical wires strung between the pipes. I walked over the electrified cattle gate with my sandals on and the rangers had a fit. I told them there was no chance of me hitting the wires with my size 15 sandals but I promised not to do it again.

The next photo is a food photo. Vicky is a gourmet around the camp with concoctions that I doubt most anyone else has thought about. You can see one of our before dinner snacks that she brought along for this trip. It was a simple one of crackers with homemade pickles and canned crab. But the story continued the next night after we got back to camp.

From my journal:

We went to take showers but the showers on our side of the campground and river were closed, due to electrical problems. So we had to drive across the river to the RV campground section and use their showers. I suggested that we all go together since the RV was also our kitchen, etc. I had checked out the showers and they were individual ones spread around a large room. I asked and we didn’t have bars of soap for all of us. Andrew had brought along some ecologically sound, concentrated, peppermint, liquid camp soap. But we couldn’t share it, so I looked for a container to put a few squirts into for myself. From our trash, I found last night’s crab can which I thought would work perfectly. By a vote of 3 to 1, it was decided that my taking a shower with a peppermint crab soap mixture was not acceptable, considering our close quarters. I was disappointed but Andrew put a few squirts into a plastic bag and away we went. It worked fine, but I’m still curious about that peppermint crab combination.

We went for walks around our campgrounds at night, looking for wildlife. On this night, we didn’t see any bears but we did see some elk, deer, and smaller animals. My big find for the night’s hiking was a partial set of elk horns as you can see in the third photo. They were heavy enough that I’d hate to carry them around on my own head.

The last photo is another food photo. April had done much of the shopping for this trip. She dutifully purchased a brand new bottle of mustard, thinking it sufficient for our trip. She soon learned that Andrew and I prefer to each have our own dedicated bottle of mustard. We made our purchase of extra mustard bottles, much to her surprise, but not to Vicky’s.