Travel: Waterton Lakes National Park

Camping in Waterton Lakes National Park – here’s the scoop!

Beautiful? Commercialized? Private?

Waterton Lakes National Park

If you’re living on the west coast of Canada I’m sure you know about all the wild fires we’ve experienced over the last few years (and are currently experiencing, actually). Well, Waterton Lakes National Park got hit pretty bad last September – over 80% of the trails were destroyed and 38% of the park went up in flames. As such, about 50% of the vegetation was lost – or rather, on a path to rejuvenation.

Lucky for us, we just got some new paddleboards and it’s the glacier lake water we were after.

Ah, meet Scooby Doo the Boler. Our Boler, Tipsy, has a cracked frame and we do plan on getting her fixed up, we just haven’t yet. As such, we camped in this embarrassing Boler, yet the community of Boler lovers full embraced us. Like GoRving Canada says “Nothing embarrassing about this! Good things take time.” Check out all the love for Scooby Doo!

Oh, another thing – no fires. Nope – just propane or you’re stuck with cereal. Everything we cooked on this trip was either in the cast iron sandwich makers (the ones you put over the fire); which work well for eggs! Or, on a stick.

This is spicy Mexican Street Corn – that recipe is coming up soon, so stay tuned.

Time to hit the water.

We never fell in. A few close calls, but that’s it.

Recap

Overall our experience in Waterton Lakes National Park was awesome – will we be back though? Doubtful. Our campsite was pretty open concept in that people can see you, walk through your site (this happened all the time) and there really isn’t any privacy. For us, that’s not very peaceful. Also, Townsite is super close. Our neighbours got take-away every night. Tacos on one and pizza the next from the local restaurants. There are about 15 restaurants all within walking distance of our site – and we were on the far side! For us, camping is about cooking over fire, disconnecting from all the work and phones, and getting back to nature. Not eating Subway in a field with a trailer. Okay, that sounds really bad – it’s not that bad, just not for us.

We’ve been camping to three places so far: Prince Albert National Park, Kootenay National Park, and Waterton National Park. Out of those three, Prince Albert is our favourite, yet the drive is a tad far. Kootenay is beautiful and out of the three, that’s probably our number one. We’ve got three camping trips left this summer – let’s hope they rock!

Thanks so much for visiting – hopefully the trails at Waterton open back up soon. We might be back just to hike, yet no Subway for us. Nope. Just good old campfire food.