Revelstoke to Golden

Wednesday morning we had a gourmet, 3-course breakfast at the Courthouse Inn in Revelstoke. 

For my first course, I had granola, berries and yogurt, and it was some of the best I ever had. The second course was an omelette with homemade seedy toast, which was also delicious. Our third course were two fresh-baked blueberry scones, which we took with us.

The drive from Revelstoke to Golden is only a few hours, so we stopped along the way in the Mt. Revelstoke National Park. Our first detour was to the Meadows in the Sky Parkway, a 26 kilometer drive up the side of Mount Revelstoke to the alpine wildflower meadows. According to our guidebook, the wildflowers start blooming the first week in August, and we got there on the 6th.

When we got there about 10 AM, the parking lot wasn’t yet full, so we got one of the last spots. Then, I had the bright idea to see if we could drive up a little further to the summit. When we got to the little green tent, however, the rangers turned us around, back to the parking lot where someone else had snagged our spot.

No worries, though. There were plenty of parking by the side of the road leading into the lot. After parking, we got our walking sticks out of the car and set off on the half-mile trail to the summit. 

The walk was beautiful with flowers everywhere. When we came into the park, we were given a pamphlet with the flowers we should look for, and we saw quite a few of them.

When we reached the summit we met a Canadian farmer and his wife. We had a nice conversation and they took our picture, and we took theirs.

On the way back, we took the road, which turned out to be a lot easier than hiking down the forest trail. 

It helped that someone had set up a pair of Adirondack chairs, looking out over the valley, so we were able to take a short rest (not that we needed it). We got back on Highway 1 a little after noon, and soon pulled off to see the Giant Cedars, at one of the only inland temperate rain forests in the US.

There were picnic tables at the start of the trail, so we got out our cooler and had a picnic lunch. 

The boardwalk trail through the old-growth cedars is only about a half-kilometer, but the trees are really impressive. We left around 2:30 PM and drove the rest of the way to Golden (BC, not Colorado).

Our reservations in Revelstoke and Golden were last minute replacements for the two days we had reserved in Jasper. The Courthouse Inn was a pleasant surprise, the Alpine Meadows Lodge in Golden was more of just a surprise. Following Google Maps, we were first surprised to be lead through Golden, then across a one-lane wooden bridge over the Kicking Horse River, and finally down four miles of gravel road on the far side of the river. It was spooky, because we didn’t know what we’d find at the end of the road. I was thinking of some Eastern European horror films I had seen.

When we got to the end of the road, we found a two-story building that looked pretty run down. We thought about turning around and trying for a room in-town. Instead, we went inside and found a pleasant lodge, with ten plain but functional rooms. 

After unpacking, we headed back across the river to Golden for some dinner. When we got there, the traffic was crazy. We almost couldn’t get across Highway 1 to the business district where all of the restaurants were. At dinner, we talked to some of the other diners, and they told us that Highway 1 was closed from Golden to Lake Louise because of a traffic accident, and that it wouldn’t reopen until midnight.

We had a nerve-racking time trying to get back across the Highway again, but finally made it back to the Lodge, where the receptionist told us that people had been calling all evening trying to get a room. We’re glad we decided to stay.