Bam, Banff! Our Camping trip through Canada’s National Parks.

There are tall, dark fir trees rooted in the soft soil of decomposing pine needles, and evening sunlight filtering through their branches as a pine cone drops right next to me. Within seconds, the first squirrel is spotted. Our front yard has a squirrel! I'm so excited that, in an ADHD-like manner, I almost run back to our campsite with the empty water bottle still in my hands instead of filling it up at the common washroom.

We spend three weeks traveling with our tent and car through Canada's national parks – more specifically, Canada's Rocky Mountains. I've got to admit: it is pretty convenient when your husband is American and lives near Yellowstone in the USA, only 500 miles from the Canadian border. You just hop over with all your gear. So after spending the summer together in Wyoming in the USA, we zip to Alberta and British Columbia.

The only question at the border: “Do you have any hashish with you?” Seriously? Yeah, the whole trunk full, of course... Even though we don't smoke anything anytime we can't stop grinning in joy as we drive into one of the most beautiful areas of the country. Canada's Rocky Mountains are different from those in the USA. Light gray, like sliding books on a shelf, the mountains stand in a landscape so vast that you could shout “Hellooo!” and the echo wouldn't come back for 20,000 years. Forests so large that you forget there's anything else on the planet but trees – and then, of course, bam, Banff! The first national park in Canadian history – and definitely not our last time there. How we hiked to ink pots and glaciers in Banff National Park, how reality caught up with us in Jasper National Park, and what exactly happened in between: hop in and come along!

Banff and Jasper National Parks are no insider travel tips. Nor do they need to be. There's always this fuss about “insider tips” an "best kept secrets" when it comes to travel. But some places are rightfully world-famous and worth seeing—for a good and simple reason: they're absolutely amazing. Of course, there are a lot of people there, especially in peak season, but that's just the way it is. Take it or leave it. “Peak season” is a relative term in Canada anyway. In June, there is often still snow, which limits hiking opportunities, then summers are very short – but can be full of forest fires – and late September already bears the risk of snow again. 

When I return to our campsite with my full water bottle, the tent is almost completely set up. I almost drop the water bottle in surprise. It's not that I don't trust my husband to set up a tent on his own, but at the moment he only has one arm. It's not that it's missing permanently or anything, but he broke his elbow a few days before we left on a paradise-like backpacking trip in Wyoming. We briefly considered canceling our camping trip to Canada. But then we decided not to. You only live once – in our case very literally, because as you may know, my husband has stage 4 cancer. What's a broken arm compared to that? Exactly. Nothing. And with his unbroken arm, he has now just pitched the tent by himself. 

Our plan for Banff is no surprise: hiking! Armed with a paper map and GPS, we set off and walk up to Stanley Glacier. After a few miles through the endless forests, we suddenly find ourselves standing in front of a sheer rock face. Vertical and cut off like a gray block of cheese. Compared to this massive wall, we are about as big as grasshoppers. However, grasshoppers can jump thirty times their body size, and we cannot. Especially not with one arm. Awestruck, we hike along the foot of the mountain range. Everything here is huge, endless, somehow unreal. A tall, white waterfall plunges over a mountain cliff in the distance. Meltwater from Stanley Glacier. It plunges and plunges. I look and look. Goosebumps. 

The next day, we want to hike to cold springs whose water color is said to look like ink. First, however, the trail leads through something quite hot: overtourism-hell. On the path through Johnston Canyon, we push our way with hundreds of other people along narrow trails high above the river. “This is like a Klamm,” says my US-husband. Note: With a German wife, you learn incredibly important words and habits. What a Klamm is (the Bavarian-Austrian term for a slot canyon with a river), why people air out their homes in Germany every day in ("lüften"), and that the names of government offices always have at least 87 letters, unless you want to go to the citizens' office, which is simply called Bürgerbüro, but has two Ü's. My husband hates words where letters have "little unpronouncable dots". 

Johnston Canyon is truly like a Klamm. Steps, ladders, and bridges lead across a deep, rocky ravine with a mountain river at the bottom. We skip the first waterfall viewpoint altogether because people are literally piling up there just to take endless selfies. The second waterfall viewpoint is a bit higher up and quieter, but it only gets really quiet a few miles later, on the path to the cold springs.

We walk through the forest for a long time, up and down. My feet just start to hurt a little when a clearing opens up, which has almost the same effect on me as a squirrel – I hold my breath. Yellowish autumn bushes cluster around a turquoise glacial river, next to five pools in five different shades of blue and green, and again there is that unbelievable backdrop with the sloping, light gray mountains that millions of years ago used to be the flat bottom of a sea. Hallelujah, bam Banff!

It's only about 190 miles from Banff National Park to Jasper National Park. So I think the drive should roughly take three to four hours. Haahaha. As we're on our way, I realize that we're on the Icefields Parkway, which several people have raved to us about as “one of the most beautiful roads in the world.” Well, nowadays everything is always described as the “most beautiful thing in the world” – thanks to social media and marketing hypes. But as we drive along, I find myself with fewer and fewer counterarguments. Mountains, mountains, mountains. In all crazy shapes and sizes, a road that stretches to the horizon, switchbacks up to a pass, a thundering glacier river, so many mountain lakes that I eventually stop counting, forests, incredibly endless carpets of fir trees, and not to forget: the Columbia Icefield – the largest glacier in the North American Rocky Mountains. 

As we stop there and hike to the edge of the glacier, I see these signs. These signs that I won't forget anytime soon. Year markers are showing where the glacier used to be before it started getting warmer on our planet. When we reach the sign for my birth year, 1991, the glacier is so far away that we can't even see it anymore. This was just freaking 34 years ago, this happened in my lifetime. Scary. The glacier loses 16 feet every year. Without glaciers, there would be no rivers or mountain lakes, no water for wildlife or people—and then Bam-Banff wouldn't be so bam anymore. To understand things, we sometimes have to experience them first-hand instead of just arguing about headlines in the media.

In the end, we spent almost nine hours on the Icefields Parkway and only got a tiny glimpse of it – next time we want to stay for several days, because there are campsites along the highway too.

Now Jasper! For me, the park is not quite as spectacular as Banff, but it's quieter. In 2024, the Jasper Wildfire Complex raged through the national park, burning 58000 acres – the worst forest fire here in more than a century. Hint: It could have something to do with the same temperatures and lack of precipitaion that is destroying the Columbia Icefield, but that's just a wild guess. Anyway, the burnt tree trunks look like creepy black toothpicks eating their way across the landscape for miles.

Unfortunately the topic "forest fires" catches up with us for real on this camping trip. While we hike through unburned parts of a beautiful primeval forest on the first day, the air is suddenly hazy on the second day. By the third day, it's completely over – all the mountains have disappeared behind a wall of fog, the air quality is classified as “unhealthy,” and we are trapped under a dome of brown smoke. West Canada is burning again. This time not right here in Jasper National Park, but on huge areas outside of it.

Close doors and windows, do not exercise outdoors, says our weather app. Funny. I look at our tent with its oh-so-many windows and doors and then at our hiking plans. The smoke is so thick in the atmosphere that the sun is just an orange disc in the sky—at noon, it looks like sunset. Normally, it would be 75°F today, but with the sunlight blocked, it's suddenly only 50°F. Wrapped in jackets, we drive to the village, the only place with cell phone reception, and begin to change all our plans for the rest of our tour. Somewhere in a documentary about volcanoes, I once heard the term “nuclear winter” – suddenly it seems so close and real.

The next day, we pack up and try to drive south away from the smoke cloud. Find out if we succeeded and what awaited us in the second part of our camping trip through Canada – coming soon. 

Feel invited to follow our stories, travels, fails, and adventures daily on Instagram: @squirrel.sarah.

Find more stories about Canada and wilderness adventures here:

• Covid-007 and the Love of my Life: How I disappeared to Canada overnight
• 24/14: Quarantine with my favorite human in the wilderness of Canada
• Flower Carpets and Snow Balls – Three days with a Tent in Paradise
• 7 Mile Hole - a Night at the Bottom of Yellowstone Canyon