Day 1
We started the tour at the Kicking Horse River Lodge in Golden. The lodge itself is a bit of an odd duck - it's a hostel, built using enormous logs (the last supply?) fitted together with dovetail construction. The exterior is stunning. The interior is furnished with a mixture of custom log/dovetail beds and the cheapest Ikea furnishings that money can buy. Private rooms are available, but interior walls are somewhat thin, which means that noise is sometimes an issue. Overall, however, it's a friendly, reasonably priced lodge that also serves a pretty good breakfast. We stashed our car here, and headed out onto the road. Although the route is usually done in a clockwise direction, we did it in reverse, hoping to save the hardest day until last. Highway 95 from Golden to Radium Hot Springs makes a gradual ascent along the Kootenay River. It was a beautiful ride in gently rolling hills to Radium Hot Springs. The Columbia Wetlands along the route provided views of beaver dams, herons and other waterfowl, and a solitary osprey that flew away as I juggled lenses to photograph its nest.
After arriving at Radium we had dinner at the local pizza joint and stayed the night at the Mountain Springs motel. The room was clean, pleasant, and reasonably priced, which was a combination that we'd be hard pressed to find later on the trip.Radium Hot Springs itself is a bit of a strange town. The hot springs seem to gather enough tourists that there's a unhealthy population of overpriced restaurants and an oversupply of motels. However, it's isolated enough that the locals haven't been completely overrun. This, combined with the sawmill down the road means that the small interior resource town is never that far away from the surface.
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