Olaf the snowman? Nope, it’s Lewgi.

The drive from Jasper to Banff deserves an entry of its own.

Holy snowflakes is the only polite way I can phrase it, and I feel the videos that I took of sections of road cannot be published due to the obscenities forcibly used by the driver (I was not the driver). Although I think I was using worse language in my head.

We set off early one morning from Jasper along a very simple road with no junctions or changes that would take us all the way to Banff. Easy right? Wrong.

I think it was only 40 minutes into the journey we past the first set of snow gates, which I would like to point out were open at the time… only to be closed an hour after we went through.

Could have been a very bad diversion...

In the first and second hours, we were laughing and joking about the weather and lack of snow trucks to clear the road. It was absolutely stunning and it really looked like a winter wonderland with glittering snow and festive trees every which way you looked.

By the third and fourth hours we were driving though a continual sludge of at least 6” of snow and our tyres were starting to get clogged with ice around the rims. There was not so much laughing as there was a weird whimpering that was meant to sound like a breezy light-hearted chuckle. 

It was the most extreme weather I have ever witnessed and the intensity lasted a mere five hours.

Now, I never tend to talk about pee breaks but I feel it has to be mentioned as I was hysterical by this point (I laugh when nervous) and this just pushed me over the edge. Being somewhat influenced by the fight-or-flight instinct I was in desperate need, so Lewis the ever caring driver pulled over to the side of the road in the safest place we could find. I do not exaggerate when I say the snow came up past my window. Try getting out of the car when there is a wall of snow, I dare you.

Somehow, in my full-bladdered state I gained super-human strength and opened Scooby’s right wing (the door). It was here, between a mixture of galloping-jumping-leaping-head-first-tumbling that I dove into a pile of snow and landed in a weird mangled knot that I couldn’t fathom how my body could twist itself into such a position. Thankfully the effort and movement that I had to perform in order to untangle myself had made a delightful 4ft high open-topped igloo. The snowy ice-toilet.

The journey to Banff was phenomenal in all senses of the word and we have never been so thankful to see cars again. It was like re-appearing from an ice-age.

Funnily enough, it was only a 1km from the Banff snow gates, aka civilization, that we saw two snow ploughs beginning to clear what we had just driven. Great timing yet again.