9/14 Lake Louise Hard-Sided Campground

There are only two campgrounds in Lake Louise:  one is for hard-sided RV, such as motorhomes and trailers that have hard sides and roof to protect the campers from bears and other predators.  This is because Lake Louise has not only black bears, but much more aggressive grizzly bears.  You cannot camp here if your camper has any canvas sides or roof.  You also cannot leave any food out, or even leave out a tablecloth that you have used to eat on because it might have food smells or scraps on it.  You also must use only small cooking grills and wrap them up and store them in a provided bear-proof container or clean them and put them inside your RV.  This campground has electrical hookups but you must use a central dump and water fill station.  

The other campground is for tents and RVs that have canvas popups or bump outs.  Because of the bear problem, this campground is surrounded by an electric fence and has an entrance platform that bears will not go over.  (There is a small pedestrian gate for humans to go through, and vehicles can drive over the bear-proof entrance platform.)  In this campground, there are strict rules for food storage in bear-proof containers.  

For obvious reasons, I stayed in the hard-sided campground, shown here:

However, as seems to be common in a lot of older Canadian campgrounds, all the sites here are double sites, which presents some problems.  A double site means that you and another set of campers are sharing one site.  There are individual electric boxes and picnic tables on each side, but there is not a lot of privacy when your rig is only a few feet away from your next-door neighbor.   

Also, every RV has the hookups on the driver's side and the entrance on the passenger's side. So, you have two choices here:  You can park as my neighbor did here on the left, with your hookups close to the electric box, but this means your entrance is on the opposite side from your picnic table. 

Or you can park as I did, with my entrance on the same side as the picnic table, but since my electric connection is on the far side of my rig, this means I need a very long cord to plug in.  Luckily, I carry a 25' 30 amp extension cord.  A lot of Canadian campers carry 30 amp extension cords because a lot of provincial parks have electric boxes a long way from camping sites, but American campers usually don't have one of these. 

 

Here is a view of the front of my motorhome and another neighbor who spent only one day next to me.  Like the other neighbor, they chose to park so their electrical cord could easily reach the box. 

 

Canadian electrical hookup boxes look a lot like the ones in the U.S., except this particular brand has a big problem.  I plugged my cord in, and flipped the circuit breaker, but nothing happened and I had no power. 

 

This photo, which was taken from a horizontal position, shows the first circuit breaker switch.  This was the one I switched on.

I had to get help from one of the rangers, and she pointed out that if you lifted the door a bit higher and looked very, very closely under it, way up on the top, there was a second circuit breaker switch, as shown here.  However, to see it, you almost have to put your head in the dirt and stand upside down.  Here is a photo of the hidden switch.  It is only visible if you are looking directly up!!  Once I knew it was there, at least I could feel for it.  

Note: This is the 20 amp side of the box.  There is an almost identical 30 amp receptacle with similar switches on the opposite side.  Very poor design, but the ranger said that the national parks had to accept the cheapest bid for things, and this is what they ended up with for electrical hookup boxes!!

This is a row of bear-proof food storage boxes for owners of hard-sided RVs to use.  Good place to put used grills that might have food particles on them.  There was also a pile of free firewood. 

 

 

One nice thing about Lake Louise is that once you set up camp, you can go almost everywhere via shuttle.  This is the waiting space for the campground shuttles. 

There is a big park and ride lot to catch shuttles to the two lakes, but it is really easier to just take the free campground shuttle.