Audio Excerpt

Take a good look around.. This would be a pretty scenic area to camp in wouldn’t it! Well guess what? You can! Welcome to Bow Valley Provincial Park! Home of the Bow River, Three Sisters, Bow Valley and Willow Rock campgrounds!  Activities include... well, camping... birdwatching, canoeing, kayaking, hiki.. Ok you know what, if I list all the fun things to do in a park near the mountains for every park on this tour...it’s going to get pretttttty annoying.. So I’ll just touch on the unique ones! The Bow Valley Provincial park offers both front and back country hiking. What’s the difference? Well front country hiking generally means you’re pretty close to civilization and can easily turn around if you realize you're going to miss Dancing with the Stars.  On the other hand, backcountry hiking is a liiiittle bit more intense. The routes are usually long and difficult, you may go days without cell phone service or running water and you're more than an hour or two away from emergency services. The awesome part about back country hiking? You’ll probably find yourself in an area pretty low on the Bortle Scale! Sooooo what’s the Bortle Scale??

Does it measure the, A) Level of contact with civilization, B) Level of mosquito population, or C) Level of light pollution?

If you answered C, Light Pollution, you rank super high on the ‘got this question right scale’! The nine level Bortle Scale measures the amount of light pollution in the night sky. The Bow Valley Provincial Park checks in at level 3 and is pretty awesome for stargazing!