A favourite view, Waterton Lakes National Park

This is where three friends (Anne B, Janet and Shirley) and I went the last two days, 11 and 12 June 2018. Part of Monday was spent travelling south to Waterton Lakes National Park, stopping at several places en route, including Lundbreck Falls. With no stops, it takes roughly three hours to get there. We stayed on Monday night at the Bear Mountain Motel in Waterton town, that you can see part of in this photo. I'm not sure, but our motel might be just off the photo on the right. Tuesday morning, we drove around the Waterton area, hoping to maybe see more bears, and then made out way back north, reaching Calgary late afternoon/early evening. As it was, we were so lucky to see a gorgeous Cinnamon Black Bear, at first from a great distance and then unexpectedly close. Also spotted a Black Bear in among the blackened, burned trees that were at the edge of the road. It was very difficult to see and impossiible to find an open spot through which to take photos - but it was our second bear.

One of my favourite mountains in Waterton is the jagged row of pinnacles that can be seen slightly right of the centre of this image. These are the Citadel Peaks pinnacles, seen from near the Prince of Wales Hotel, high up on the cliff overlooking Upper Waterton Lake. The wind was SO strong for the whole of our stay (which is why I did not stand closer to the edge!) and it is amazing that any of my photos taken on these two days came out at all. A real challenge for any camera Image Stabilization system!

I had been hoping to someday get a chance to get down to Waterton, especially to see how it looked after the devastating Kenow wildfire that damaged or destroyed so much of the park in 2017. Most of the park is still closed, but the whole town site and Chief Mountain Parkway and area are open. To me, the park looked beautiful, with enough green areas to contrast with the dead trees on the mountain sides. Firefighters did such a brilliant job last year of saving the whole town, and a team of firefighters form Calgary had been given the task of doing all they could to save the historic Prince of Wales Hotel, seen in my next image. There it still stands, untouched. One can see how close to the town and iconic Hotel the fire had come - right up to the very edge, where a sprinkler system had been set up before the fire got close. Wild animals, plants and birds were seen. There were plenty of wildflowers, though I suspect we may have been just a little early for many species. I was so pleased to spot a small patch of what I thought might be Mariposa Lilies near the edge of the road that we were driving on. We stopped for me to check and, sure enough, my friends were able to see these unusual flowers for the first time. Chipmunk, Golden-mantled Ground Squirrels, Colombian Ground Squirrels and deer were seen. Not a huge variety of birds, but we were only able to look in such a limited space. It was great, though, to see two distant Sandhill Cranes and a distant Common Loon on her nest.

"With its merging landforms, connected ecoregions and its mild, moist, windy climate, Waterton Lakes National Park is an amazing meeting place for an abundant and diverse collection of vegetation.

Despite it's small size (505 sq km) Waterton is graced with over 1000 species of vascular plants . Over half of Alberta's plant species are found in this tiny place. The park's four ecoregions - foothills parkland, montane, subalpine and alpine - embrace forty-five vegetation communities. Sixteen of these are considered significant because they are rare or fragile and threatened.

Waterton also has an unusually high number of rare plants - over 175 are provincially rare (e.g. mountain lady's-slipper, pygmy poppy, mountain hollyhock), and over twenty of these are found only in the Waterton area (e.g. western wakerobin, Lewis' mock-orange, white-veined wintergreen). Over 50 species are rare in Canada (e.g. Bolander's quillwort, Lyall's scorpionweed, Brewer's monkeyflower.)" From Parks Canada website.

www.pc.gc.ca/eng/pn-np/ab/waterton/natcul/natcul1/f.aspx

Apart from the wind, we were very lucky with the weather for our two days. No rain, thank goodness. The morning was chilly and so was the night. Yesterday, Tuesday, the temperature got up to 20C on our way home.