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The main part of the trip was hiking in the Banff area; most planning was done by Dev, so the idea was to get 4-8 hours hiking each day. We stayed the first two days in a very nice Bead & Breakfast in Canmore, Cedar Springs; the next two nights we stayed at the famous Fairmont hotel in Lake Louise, where I made another gigapixel panorama. The hotel has really fantastic view, but I'd say it's overpriced since the rooms are pretty small and rather ordinary and service/food unspectacular. This area really has fantastic hiking trails. the last few days we spent in Banff town, staying in a chalet at the Jasper lodge. Most eating in Banff is in bar-restaurants, which are pretty nice and serve up huge varieties of beer. Kitty even started to appreciate Indian Pale Ale.
The hiking was somewhat constrained since some trekking paths were still not opened up -- it turns out that the snow does not
totally melt until perhaps mid-July, and it's no fun hiking on snow-covered/obscured paths, especially with our (lack of) gear.
the hikes we made (approximately in chronological order) were:
Day 1. Canmore, Grassi Lakes
Day 2. Kananskis: Prairie View; Barrier Lakes in retrospect, so so.
Day 3. Johnston canyon; Castle Peak lookout slightly rainy day, but not too bad.
Day 4. Drive along Highway 93; Peyto Lake; Columbia Icefield; Wilcox Trail Unbelievable scenery on the road and hikes
Day 5. Plain of six glaciers; Big beehive Had a bit of an adventure on this hike; great views otherwise
Day 6. Banff area, Sulpher mountain;
Day 7. Horseback riding in Banff; Tunnel mountain My memory is a bit fuzzy on what we did on the first two days in Banff
Day 8. Moraine Lake We drove back to Lake Louise area to hike in the beautiful Moraine lake area.
Gigapixel Panoramas: Let's start with the links to the two gigapixel panoramas (1 Gigapixel in full size is approximately 500 screens) from this trip: the first one was taken at Niagara, and the second one at Lake Louis from the lawn in front of the Fairmont. The perspective on that one is rather interesting. These were processed using Autopano by my friend and pano freak Pedro Sander, and uploaded to the gigapan site by him.
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niagara_7g_t.jpg |
lake_louis_10g_t.jpg |
Panoramas: Here are a few small(er) panoramas from the trip. These are made up of 3-5 shots with the G12 in pano-assist mode and stitched using Canon's software. These will just pop open in new windows, which doesn't give you much zoom-in/out facility to view them. I will program a better viewer for these when I get the time.
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 wilcox_t.jpg |
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