It’s 11:00pm here in Banff and we’ve just got back from having something to eat and a pint.  The strange thing is, after travelling all this way, we come across a bar called the Rose and Crown…. :0)

As this was our last day in Banff, we decided to go out and see if we could spot any more wildlife before we start heading out of the various National Parks tomorrow.  Are we glad we did.

Yesterday we told you about driving down this graded road (highway 742) and that we were lucky enough to see a female Moose.  Well we drove exactly the same road today and only about 10 km in, Kim spotted a black bear in the bushes, we watched for a while to see if we could get a photo or two when about 30 feet ahead of us, he burst out onto the road and ran across to the other side – boy could he move! Lewis got a picture of his bum and Kim got some very shaky video footage!

Further down the highway we were highly entertained by watching 2 red squirrels playing “Chase Me” up some trees.  In fact they were so entertaining that Lewis dug out his tripod and put the big lens on his camera.  You can see the photos on our Flickr feed.

Seeing we couldn’t spend all day with the squirrels we decided to move on….  Now when we arrived here in Canada we were welcomed to temperatures of roughly 30 degrees and have had some wonderful weather, in fact, if you speak to local Canadians they would tell you that they were just having their summer now!!!

So we’ve had some lovely hot weather…..  Not today we haven’t !!!  When we headed out the temperature was roughly 6 or 7 degrees.  Well after leaving the squirrels and driving further along this unmade road, the temperature started to drop and got down to a chilly 1 or 2 degrees and then the heavens just opened with rain, hail and then sleety snow!!!  Just to make matters worse the driving conditions almost got to the point where you couldn’t actually see where you were going….

We stopped at a lodge off the highway and got a coffee while waiting for the weather to ease up and then we headed out again. We were convinced that we wouldn’t see any further wildlife given the current weather conditions……

Not 15 minutes later, we spotted a moose ……..a big bull moose with massive antlers…… he was magnificent. We managed to pull over and he was on some open land and we were looking down a slope at him. He didn’t seem worried by our prescence, in fact he seemed so laid back, he mooched for a while and then laid down, so we spent a while watching him and taking some great photos.

We eventually tore ourselves away and headed back for the hotel and the last night in these magnificently comfy beds……off to Golden tomorrow as part of the return route home and we hope to visit the Grizzly Bear Refuge and peek at Boo the bear, this may be the only way we can see a Grizzly here as we do have a plane to catch back home on Thursday!!!