Waterton Lakes National Park of Canada

The actual Canadian Rockies portion of this trip started on Monday, August 15, when we crossed into Canada. We took the very lightly traveled road from St Mary Lake to Waterton Lakes National Park of Canada. At the border crossing, we were the only vehicle there and we had a nice visit with the Canadian crossing official. The total mileage on Monday was 46 miles, but we are now on Kilometers, which is driving me nuts.

The first photo is of upper Waterton lake, which is about 6 miles long. The photo was taken from the Prince of Wales Hotel looking south . The town of Waterton Park is in the lower right of the photo right on the lake, with the campground just behind, beneath the mountains. About 1/2 of the lake is in Montana, so you are seeing upper Glacier National Park at the far side of the lake.
The majestic Prince of Wales Hotel sits on a bluff overlooking the lake and the town. It was built in the 1920's and has high wood beamed ceilings with elaborate arches, balconies and turrets. It dominates the skyline. There are fairly heavy winds coming off of the lake, both in town and in the CG. It is said that the hotel creaks and rattles at night because of the winds.
The campground is on a naturally flat plain, about 1 mile in diameter, just adjacent to the town. All options exist at the CG, from no hookups to full. They use an odd system of site assignment at this park. Reservations are possible, but they are not site specific. Our experience with this type of system in the past is that you pick from the available empty sites when you arrive, on a first come-first served basis. You then have the site for the number of nights that you have reserved. The system used at Waterton arbitrarily assigns your site, based on your reservation details (vehicle length, hookups, etc). We had a poor site assigned to us initially, but there were many good sites nearby that were empty when we arrived. We asked to be switched to one of them, but our number of nights didn't match the number of nights reservation for any of those sites. Those other sites were also arbitrarily assigned. So we couldn't move, even though we were here first. We had spotty service from the staff. The first agent, a young man, said "you are stuck with what you got", a very customer friendly attitude. I tried a second time, after the shift change and a young woman tried to move us but was unable to match the same number of nights reserved in one of the other empty campsites to ours. She was very helpful.
But enough complaining! The second photo show our RV with the mountains in the background.
Cameron creek flows through the CG, flowing over Cameron falls just above the CG.
The third photo show Pris in front of the falls, with our newly acquired bear spray. Besides the hike to Cameron Falls, we have taken other hikes while following the instructions of talking loudly and clapping our hands. There are grizzle bear warning signs on the trails, which is a little disconcerting.
We are thoroughly enjoying the town of Waterton Lakes. It's a small town within easy walking distance of the Townsite CG. It has several good restaurants, nice quaint shops, and several coffee and ice cream shops.
As a practical matter, the grocery stores are very limited, there is no bank here, and even though they have ATMs, our cards won't work. We were able to get a store to exchange US money for Canadian dollars but charged us a 5% rate. But we needed money to buy those ice cream cones. All businesses take charge cards, however. No Verizon coverage here either.