British Columbia --- Fort Steele and Kimberly

Today was a looong day of driving.  Instead of taking the most direct route toward Banff (via Calgary), we are taking the scenic route (to the west).  Today’s drive took us from Waterton in Alberta, to Cranbrook, B.C. and on up to Kootenay National Park.

Our first stop today was the Heritage Town/Living Museum of Fort Steele, near Cranbrook.  In the 1860’s gold was discovered in the area, and people flocked to the town.  By the 1890’s the town had boomed into the bustling center of the East Kootenay district.  Unfortunately, the Canadian Pacific Railway decided to bypass the town, leading to its ultimate demise.  By the 1950’s the town’s buildings were decaying and only a handful of residents still lived in the area.

After local citizens put pressure on the government to preserve the town, Fort Steele was declared a historic park in 1961.  Over 60 buildings have been restored or reconstructed and furnished as they would have been at the turn of the century.  Visitors can now walk through and experience what it would have been like to visit these buildings back in the 1890’s – the town includes several homes and hotels, a dentist’s office, druggist, bakery, blacksmith, three churches, a school, and this general store and dressmaking shop.  Everything was so perfectly detailed, it felt a little like walking through the set of “Little House on the Prairie”.

During the summer, several of the buildings are staffed with people re-enacting what they would have done back in the 1890’s – today there was a blacksmith hard at work at his anvil, a baker selling bread and pastries, and a homemaker baking pies in one house.  School was in session at the one-room schoolhouse as well.

After lunch we continued on towards the Kootenay National Park, with a brief stopover in Germany (!!!).  Our Moon guide for Western Canada describes Kimberly as a town that has been “Bavarianized”.  It was an apt description, because standing in the Platzl and listening to all the oom-pah music blaring from all the shops, I really did feel for a moment that I was in the Alps somewhere.  The town’s main claim to fame is the “World’s Largest Cuckoo Clock”.  Kevin was overjoyed to pose for a photo with it, but surely there are larger cuckoo clocks in the world, right?  This one’s not much larger than a garden shed.

Just before we headed to the campground for the evening, we stopped in at the Radium Hot Springs for a soak in the natural hot pool.  It wasn’t quite what I’d expected – unlike the natural setting of the Boiling River near Yellowstone this was a bright blue swimming pool that was just heated with water from the hot spring.  But we both found it very relaxing after a long day on the road, despite the biohazardous-sounding name.