Echo Lake Retreat

So after the awesome weekend Caitlin and I had in Calgary and Banff, we came back to Medicine Hat and then left again on Tuesday for the Canadian Humanitarian retreat at Echo Lake in Montana.  The founders of the organization have a lake house there.  We followed Lyndon, the executive director of the organization, to the lake.  He actually went the wrong way at first which added about 1 hour to our trip.  It was supposed to be a 6 hour drive but it ended up being a little more than 7.  That felt like nothing compared to the road trips we had been making lately!  It was weird going through the border into the US.  The border patrol officer working at the gate wasn't friendly at all.  I was expecting them to be decent since Caitlin and I are American, like we part of the same club or something, but the guy was a jerk.  Kind of sucks that jerk people can be the first experience foreigners have with getting into America.  I remember thinking that when I came back from Korea too.

It was a pretty boring drive except these pretty fields occasionally

We stopped in Cardston to eat at Subway and stopped at the temple there too for a minute.

Anyways, the lake house was awesome.  The people that were there were me and Caitlin, Dick and Deb Northcott and their daughter Rachel, Carol and her family, and then Lyndon and his four girls and one of their friends.  The first day we were there was Canada Day, so we didn't do any work, but just had fun all day.  Caitlin had never tried water skiing before, but she got up pretty quickly - it didn't take her too many tries.  I got up on the single ski and afterwards my entire body was sore.  I forgot how tiring skiing can be, and I forgot how being in shape really helps with water skiing.  It was super fun though!  The water temperature was amazing!  It felt great and refreshing, not too cold or too warm, but just right.

The next few days I met with the other Canadian Humanitarian people for about 4 hours each day and we worked on work stuff.  After working though, it was all playing on the lake!  Caitlin also got a lot of reading done while we were inside working.  She read the first three Harry Potter books, and she liked them too!  I couldn't believe that she hadn't read those books when we were dating.  It's not that she just hadn't read them, she read the first two and part of the third and stopped because she was bored or didn't like it!  I couldn't believe it.  Anyways, Caitlin and I were pulled on tubes behind the boat and that was super funny!  Caitlin couldn't stop laughing while she was on the tube!  She fell off kind of a lot during one tube session, but she did great holding on for the most part, even when things were getting crazy!  I fell off once on a turn going pretty fast and it felt like I was skipping on the water for like 50 meters.  Almost lost my board shorts too...

View from the upper deck of the lake house.

View of the dock from the deck.

There are the tubes, one of the kayaks, the canoe, and the paddle board



I also found out that I love paddle boarding.  I wanted to be on the paddle board all the time that I wasn't in the boat.  Caitlin is small enough to take out the little green kayaks, but I was a little too big and fell in repeatedly when I tried one out.  Caitlin had a good laugh.  But we'd paddle over to this little cove every once in a while to see if we could spot any turtles.  We only saw one.  Here are some more pictures.

Later in the week we tried wake boarding.  Caitlin has wake boarded once before, so she got up this trip on her second attempt!  Woo!  At the beginning of the week, there were basically no other boats on the lake, but the closer it got to the weekend and the 4th of July, more and more boats were appearing.  So, it's a good thing we got some skiing in early in the week, and later we did mostly tubes and a little wake boarding.





Huge air off the wake!!! Just kidding.  I'm pretty terrible at wake boarding.

On the 4th of July there was a big breakfast at the LDS church in the area, but everyone at the lake house seemed like they didn't really want to go and said they'd make pancakes instead, so Caitlin and I slept in expecting to eat at the lake house.  BUT when we woke up, everyone had gone to the church already!  We hopped in the car and tried to find the church, but we didn't know where we were going and the GPS didn't know where the church was either.  So we ended up going out to eat breakfast at the Echo Lake Café which we found off of the main road and it was pretty good!

I got the corned beef hash and Caitlin got like a mixture of different pancakes.

**This is Caitlin jumping in really quick.  I just have to say that it was SUCH a fun, relaxing time at the lake!  It was kind of annoying having so many kids around so that we didn't get to ski or wake board very much for the amount of time we were there, but it was fine because I was SO SORE from both water skiing and wake boarding.  Those muscles I never use!  Also, we rode on the adult tube rides with the big teenage boys who loved being super intense and ramming the two tubes together.  At one point I was about to flip off and we bumped into their tube so I just hopped over onto it while going full speed!  It was awesome.  After that the two teenagers kept trying to hop from tube to tube but were not as successful as I was.  I loved reading so much, I loved getting a tan, I loved being fed and not having to worry about food (thanks, Deb!), I just loved so much of it!  It was so nice of them to invite us to come along.  Also, spur of the moment going out to breakfast with Billy was so fun!  I think the best part of the whole trip was not wearing make up honestly haha and just being able to jump in the lake whenever and not having to worry about anything.  The temperature was so nice and everything was so chill, it was amazing.  Ok I'm done now.**


The next day we woke up really early and left for the Kalispell airport in Montana to fly Caitlin to San Diego.  It was pretty sad, since we wouldn't be seeing each other again for a couple months.  After that, I drove back to Medicine Hat. 

The GPS took me through Glacier National Park and that was amazing!  I wish Caitlin was there to see it with me.  I kept hoping that I'd see a bear, and sure enough about 10 minutes after wishing that, I had to stop to let a bear cross the road!  It was awesome!  I also saw a deer, but it was only just a deer, so not that exciting.  Going through the border to get back into Canada, they had me park and asked me tons of questions in their station.  It took about 20 minutes, but I got through and had a pretty uneventful drive back to Medicine Hat.  It was a great retreat at the lake!

Caitlin is willing to scale an extremely steep mountain to save $70...aka our trip to Banff National Park

After a super busy day exploring Calgary, we woke up early and ate the complimentary breakfast at our hotel, and took a couple bagels for the road.  We felt like rebels taking food out of the dining area.  It was about a 1.5 hour drive to Banff.  Once we got there, we realized we did not know where anything was.  So we went to the information center on the main boulevard and planned out our day.  As soon as I (Caitlin) got out of the car at the information center, I heard an owl hooting in a tree and I knew this place was magical.

First, we went to Johnston Canyon.  The hike was beautiful!  It was so green and foresty, and there was a river with really neat waterfalls.  The water was so clear and also like a really cool blue-green color.  Every two seconds Caitlin would excitedly talk about how pretty the water was.  We hiked to the lower falls, then to the upper falls, around 3 miles total.  Some people from Europe I think were actually going over the railing and filling up their water bottles in the river water, just above the huge waterfall.  If they tripped while in the river, there was a good chance they would have gone down the falls and died.

At the start of the hike crossing a bridge

Pretty view approaching the lower falls

We had to walk through a cave tunnel to get this close to the waterfall.  It was splashing so much water and mist on us, but it felt great!  And I bonked my head on the cave tunnel ceiling on the way out which kind of hurt, but I pretended like it didn't.  We couldn't figure out how to get us in front of the rock and the falls next to us, so this is the best we got.

The upper falls.  

This is where the European people were getting into the river to fill up their water bottles, just above the upper falls.

We got ice cream cones at the end of the hike from this little shack.  And the ice cream was DELICIOUS!

Me shining bright like an angel at the ice cream shack

Ice cream selfie.

The next stop we hit was the Vermillion Lakes to canoe.  Haha, we thought we were in the lake, but I just looked it up on a map and we actually canoed in Bow River, just next to Vermillion Lakes.  So, apparently we canoed in Bow River, which was awesome!  We got the rental all set up and then ran to the gas station so Caitlin could change into her swimsuit, then we hopped in the canoe and were paddling.  It was also very beautiful.  All of Banff is beautiful.  On the canoe Caitlin was freaking out again like every two seconds about how beautiful the water, the trees, the mountains, the sky, and pretty much everything her senses could take in were.  I was also blown away by the beauty, and very amused with Caitlin.  It was like she couldn't absorb it all quick enough. Haha.  Here's some pictures!

We were daring and canoed under this tree and one like it a couple times.

Caitlin's face all day :)

We asked this guy to take a pic for us and ended up with a selfie

Next stop was to see the Banff Fairmont Hotel.  It is really big and up in the mountain surrounded by big beautiful trees.  It took some driving and getting lost to find it, but we got to a good viewpoint and also saw some other cool stuff on the way.

Haha! I told Caitlin to act like a building.

Ugly faces!  I win...

I had to include this one because Caitlin looks so pretty.

We hiked a short trail to see this watery area that people were swimming in.  We tried to make it down, but there were huge cliffs so we couldn't get in the water.

A couple had made there way to this little beach and were just hanging out.  The woman said hi to us once she spotted us creepin in the forest

 Next we went to see the hoodoos.  We drove out there and took the trail to the viewpoint.  There weren't as many hoodoos as we expected, but it was still really pretty.  We were the only people up there for a while, so that was nice too, because everywhere else was pretty crowded.

So there are the hoodoos just to my right, those pointy rocks.  The rest of the view was awesome!

Caitlin is Banff's Vanna White

The last thing we did in Banff was AMAZING!  We were planning on riding the gondola up Sulpher Mountain and ride it back down but our tickets would have been $35 each!  So we decided to hike up!!!  After 6:30 pm the ride down is free.  I was 80% willing to pay the money and do the gondola ride round-trip because I was already tired from everything else we had done, but Caitlin was feeling good and we wanted to save the money to use on something more useful like candy or ice cream or going out to dinner or something.

So the hike was 3.5 miles to the summit and had a 655 meter elevation gain, or about 2,150 feet.  Caitlin is so in shape and hates bugs so much that she was flying up the mountain to avoid mosquitoes biting her.  I was dying.  I wanted to lie down and sleep on the trail, but it was kind of eerie hiking up because we were all alone and I thought a bear was going to pop out of no where and attack us.  So I was looking around as we were hiking for bears and for good rocks to pick up and throw at a bear and bash its nose.

We made it to the top in about 1 hour and 20 minutes!  That was pretty fast!  The trail information says it takes about 2-3 hours to hike.  Here are some pictures!

Slackers taking the easy way up.

You can still kind of tell even though we're in the shade, but my face was red and throbbing and I was dying, but Caitlin was fine.

Sooo tired couldn't even force a smile

Sitting down at the top!

It was so sunny that we went through a lot of photos where we both had eyes shut or just one of us.  Here's a few.

Finally got it!

The town of Banff from the top of Sulphur Mountain.  WOW.

Here's the gift shop, gondola pick-up/drop-off and a restaurant on top.  There's a walkway to the left that goes down, then up even higher to an observation post.  We went there next.

Here's a view of the summit with the restaurant and gondola area from the observation post.

Riding down in the gondola for FREE!

 After Sulphur Mountain, we went to the main street in the town of Banff and ate at Subway, then Caitlin drove most of the way home to Medicine Hat because I still felt like I was going to die.  Oh, and on the way home, some crazy guy was driving the opposite way on the highway!  He flew right past us on the lane to our left!  It was kind of scary because we were in the left lane like one minute before.  It was a set up with two lanes going west, a large open median, and two lanes going east.  Crazy...

We need to come back and spend at least a week at Banff.  There is still so much to do and see!  It was an awesome day trip though! 

Also, we are kicking ourselves big time that we didn't bring our fancy camera!!!!  All these pics would be 10 zillion times better with the nice camera.  We'll just have to go back...