CANADIAN ROCKIES

By Foreign Natives

September 4^th, 2015

Here we were! When we set up for our road trip 3 months ago, we had a single clear goal in mind: the Canadian Rocky Mountains. We knew that winter would come soon and fast, so we made a conscious choice to drive up north pretty fast in order to get there before it got too cold and, finally, we had made it! And it was as impressive as we expected.

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We spent 3 weeks jumping between Glacier, Yoho, Banff and Jasper National Parks. Big blue lakes, huge vertical rock walls and bear-infested forests was our playground.

On our first hike, Victor noticed the big amount of mushrooms all around. Coming from Catalonia, where mushroom picking is almost a religious pilgrimage for us every autumn, we couldn’t stop ourselves from trying to know more about the local mushrooms and what we could use for cooking. So we bought a book and headed to the forest to start our hunt. How big was our surprise when we saw what looked like a “rovelló” for us!

“Rovellons”, or “Lactarius Deliciosus”, is a species native to the Pyrenees and it’s one of the most sought after fungi in our region (Catalonia). It was accidentally introduced to other countries and, as we found out, Canada is one of them. The cool thing is that it’s not known at all here, so people don’t eat them or collect them. The result was forests with tons and tons of “rovellons” just for ourselves. Magical!

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Weather was a bit colder than we expected, but the snow made up for some dramatic landscapes.

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We hiked every afternoon on weekdays, and we did longer hikes on the weekends. On our last weekend we adventured into the Skyline Trail, in the Jasper area.

The Skyline Trail is a 45km point to point trail that has 3 high mountain passes and traverses several different natural environments along the way. It is usually easy to spot wildlife, from Grizzly Bears to Elks and it’s also a Caribou reservation. We woke up early, hitchhiked our way to the trail head and hiked all the trail through the snow in a single day.