#35. Banff (Thursday, July 21, 2022)

#35. Banff (Thursday, July 21, 2022)

What was your best day…of clearing your mind entirely?

Part 1

Even in the days and weeks leading up to this trip, I knew it was going to be different.

Perhaps it was being confined inside for the last two years, and thus fully appreciating how special of a thing travel was. Or the fact that, for the first time in a long time, I was travelling in a group that went beyond just myself and my immediate family. It was me, my mom, my brother1, his German girlfriend Lysa, and two of my mom’s friends.

For honestly the first time ever, I was fully in the mindset of treating this vacation as what it was. A vacation. To relax, have fun, and have a change of scenery. Nothing more, nothing less.

I don’t need to say much about Banff here. Just look at the photo, imagine that but stretching for a few hundred miles, then go visit in person. That’s it.

As it often is with these things, the first day – with all the pent-up anticipation for what’s to come – is the part I look back on the most fondly. After we arrive in Calgary in the early afternoon and walk around the riverfront, my mom and brother head back to the airport to pick up Lysa flying in from Germany, while I head into downtown to meet up with work colleagues in my institution’s Calgary office.2

Thursday is Happy Hour for them, so I’m seeing a lot of these colleagues for the first time over beers. It’s a rocking time, and it feels surreal doing this with people I’m familiar with but in a completely new locale. These Happy Hours tend to go into the night – and this one does, because it’s the last day for our trader Radomir3 – but this time I’m able to restrain myself to just two pints, so that I’m in a semi-decent state when everyone comes to pick me up to head to Lake Louise two hours later. (I drive most of the trip, but my mom takes over that day.)

Something about flying four hours, then dropping in for two (easily could’ve been six) hours of drinks with a group of old/new friends, then straight jumping into a car on my way to a completely different six-day adventure was just so incomparably cool.

Given the attitude going in, and the location we’re dealing with here, I don’t think anything in the next six days could have dampened this whole experience – save for some life-altering accident. Which almost happened, depending on who you ask…

Part 2

It was our fourth day, and we were at one of the mountains in Jasper. There’s a good number of tourists there, but while walking around it, we see a path that leads down to very base of the mountain where there’s still snow frozen near a small pond. There’s nobody down there, and there is a sign warning of falling rocks, but we head down anyways.

Ten minutes in, I hear a loud thunder-like sound, and look up at the sky to see it all clear. What was that? A second later, Lysa points to the top part of the mountain where a handful of rocks are falling (and landing on some lower layer of the mountain that’s still high above us). Now, we’re standing a fair bit away from the side of the mountain – at least a hundred feet – and I don’t see any other rocks falling, so I don’t think anything of it. But the next thing I know, I see Mr. Ming (our family friend) who’s about twenty feet in front of me turning towards me and charging away from the mountain with a look of complete terror on his face.

My only reflex, naturally, is to also run back as fast as humanly possible (across an uneven rock terrain). And my brother, who is smartly standing another hundred feet back, captures me and Mr. Ming and Lysa on his phone while laughing and shouting, “Run bro, run!” (before joining in the running himself).

Following that apparently-traumatic experience, I maintain that we were perfectly safe (no rocks came near the base, as I recall). But of course my mom – and clearly Mr. Ming – thought differently, so we decide it’s better to be a bit more cautious around mountainsides moving forward.

Some other (less life-threatening) highlights from the trip:

  • Speaking of rocks, on our initial drive over from Calgary to Lake Louise, some small rocks hit our rented car (from seemingly nowhere) and leave a tiny dent. Two hours before we go to return it our last day, we discuss whether to point it out to the car rental place and can’t come to an agreement. Then, fifteen minutes before we get to the airport, while I’m driving behind this large truck (bad idea), another much larger rock flies towards our windshield and creates a huge spider-web crack on the very side of it. Well, that’s one problem solved.4
  • One of the funnest parts of trips like this going from place to place (Banff, Jasper, Lake Louise) is that you have to change hotels every one or two days. Which is even more awesome when you have a group of six, and have a giant suite/cabin to explore each time like it’s the coolest thing in the world (at least to me… my brother found my reactions almost as funny as my avalanche escape).
  • The other common danger with Banff is, of course, the bears. They’re rare inside the forests, but sometimes a little one will wander to the side of the highway. This happened twice, both times we knew because a long line of cars had just stopped so people could take pictures of it. I got a few good shots, but my mom thought the more amusing photo was of the 20-30 of us standing there holding up our phones like idiots.5
  • We went on three particularly long climbs. One at Lake Louise with a small teahouse (with really good homemade soups and sandwiches) at the top, one near the Banff hot springs that just circled around the mountain a hundred times, and Wilcox Point – probably the coolest. For that, there were some sketchy slopes dangerously close to the mountain edge6, but once you get up there’s a whole new level of rocky terrain with glaciers that you can hike across for a full hour while feeling like you’ve on a completely new planet.
  • Another great part is spending the nights in the small towns on Banff and Jasper and the “everyone is a tourist here relaxing and having a good time” air that comes with it. Unfortunately, the one nightclub in Banff was closed, but my brother, Lysa, and I did go to some pretty sweet craft breweries.7

And thus went my vacation, in the purest form of the word.

  1. My dad didn’t go. Instead, he went on two separate trips to Punta Cana in 2022 – the second of which all four of us went on (and could potentially make this list once I have some distance from it, #74). That guy was unhealthily obsessed with that place.
  2. Half the traders on our team are based there (#74), as are several risk and operational staff – many of whom I work with for the reserves as well.
  3. Who’s leaving to work at a hedge fund in the Bahamas. So I’m seeing him for the first time on his last day. From just drinking with him the two hours I was there, it’s a shame that was the only in-person interaction we ever had…
  4. It’s okay in the end because we were insured. The car rental guy tells us later on that this is apparently quite common in Calgary/Alberta.
  5. She’d been hoping the baby bear would make a small movement so she could take a shot of all of us scattering, but that luckily didn’t happen.
  6. On the way up, we meet up with two guys who are completely plastered; who, in the course of two separate rest stops, lose their wallets and their keys (that we retrieve for them). I think they made it down alright, though.
  7. Probably the funniest moment of the trip: We were waiting ten minutes for the shuttle from the Banff town centre back to our hotel. Then, right as the bus pulls in, some guy in a teal track suit just appears out of nowhere at the stop (literally seemed like he materialized out of thin air) and asks all of us waiting if this small Banff shuttle goes to Calgary (two hours away). When we say no and get on the bus, he just stands there alone at the stop with a look of resigned disappointment on his face.