Climbing a Mountain

 So there hasn't been an incredible amount of things going lately mostly because we have been taking it easy and enjoying the tranquil town of Banff. The place is beautiful, as you can obviously see from the photo`s. We were very fortunate to get a very cold day on the first day we arrived, which would sound pretty crappy, but it did produce quite a bit of snow which is unusually early for this time of year, so it made our views exceptionally better.

This is the view we woke up to on the first morning at The Rimrock Resort

Lets start with the hotel. Now, this hotel, the Rimrock Hotel Resort, is exceptional. But what makes it even better is that we had previously come from a hostel, which to its credit was quite a nice one, but hostel and 5 star hotel are worlds apart. And to make things even nicer, we didn't have weird people sleeping in the same room as us! That was indeed very strange, considering we had woken them up on our arrival at 10:30pm and they just starred blankly into our souls because we had disturbed their slumber. But enough on that, back to the hotel. While the hotel was grand, the view was simply sublime. If you refer to the picture above, that was the view through our 4m x 3m landscape window, and it was largely helped by being put on the highest floor, which for the life of me I can`t understand why they granted my request considering we only paid $72 a night! (even the reception was stunned at the price).


A snow topped mountain right by our hotel





We decided to take it easy once we arrived in our luxury hotel, so went spent a couple of hours admiring the view and watching cable TV, because it was the first time we had ever had TV ANYWHERE, so naturally it was amazing. 

 

The start of our 3 hour hike up Sulphur Mountain

 

After a short relax, I decided we should climb a mountain. But not any old mountain, I wanted one of the biggest and steepest. Lauren called me crazy, but I think she was the crazy one when she decided to come with me. Now, let me first explain a couple of things. This hike was meant to be around 5.5km, which doesn't sound like a lot, probably would take the average person 1 hour and 20 minutes to walk that distance in suburbia. But this wasn't suburbia, far from it, turns out we chosen to climb one of the steepest mountains, and what made it worse was when we were starting to tire, after the first 10 minutes of the 3 hour hike, we were constantly reminded that there was a gondola effortlessly taking people to the top in under 4 minutes. But it was all in good fun. That was until the 2 hour, Lauren had hit the 6 stages of grief, which involves, yelling at trees, myself and throwing rocks over the small cliff faces in frustration and kicking the heads off snowmen (yes, we were walking up a steep incline path that was eventually covered in snow!). She then resorted to having a small weep, followed by more yelling, and then came acceptance after merely 40 minutes of the cycle, I call that progress. View below for images on the hike.



View of the Banff Gondola during the hike
 



Half way up incredibly tired selfie

One of the incredible views we saw during the hike

Finally made it to the top! We were super tired as you can tell by Kristian`s facial expression.

This face I am pulling here is of pure relief. You see, not only was the 3 hours one of the most grueling hikes of my life, but I also had to literally push Lauren up the mountain during the last hour. Her body had given up, and the only progress we were making was penguin steps, which honestly rolling up the mountain would have been quicker.


But the view from the top was worth it (click on picture to see it better)
 

But as you can see, it was all worth it! The views were spectacular at the summit. But the problem was, there was an observatory in view approximately 1.2km`s away, in which I had the urge to view (being the little ADHD kid I am). I`ll upload some of my 360 degrees photo`s from that later tonight. While grueling, it was worth it. 

View of Banff from the top of Sulphur Mountain

 



All of our hard work was rewarded by getting these incredible pork rib bites for dinner!

 

This little dry rib pieces are literally one of the best human foods you can buy. Lauren is literally drooling at the sight of them while I write.

And RIIIIIBS!

 

 

We are still trying to work out the formatting on blogger, so please excuse this last paragraph being incredibly small. We will endeavor to sort out this problem.

 

We are off to Lake Louise and Moraine Lake today for a quick little guided tour, so we will upload some photos from that most likely tomorrow.

 

Until then,

Kristian & Lauren.