A snowy day in Banff

I woke up because of one of my roommates in the middle of the night - she was apparently sleepwalking. It kind of creeped me out a bit since she was moving around on the floor and making weird noises. As I didn't really know how to handle her, I went to the reception to ask for earbuds and when I told them about what was happening, the girl from the reception came with me to wake the sleepwalker up. When I asked the sleepwalker about the whole thing later today around noon, she didn't remember anything about the whole incident and told me that she had been totally drunk.

When I woke up this morning, it was snowing. After getting ready and eating breakfast, I asked the receptionist about things I could do in and around Banff today. She recommended the Fenland trail, a 2 km hike not too far from here. I decided to try it out and since it was still snowing, I put on several warm layers of clothes.
On the way to the trail, I already realized that my shoes were not really water or rather snow proof. However, I chose to ignore this as I didn't want to turn back.
The trail was a loop through a foresty area. Just when I was about to start the loop, there were two women with two dogs coming from the opposite direction. They told me that they had just seen some fresh bear trails up ahead and that they turned around because of that. While they were telling me about this, I saw a deer standing just a few feet from our location, which was kind of cool. As it was still snowing heavily and there were really no other people around, I reconsidered my path. I really didn't want to run into a bear while hiking on my own.
Consequently, I decided to only walk a small part of the loop and then cross a bridge and walk on another nearby street that was a lot less remote. I followed that street until I could see the first Vermilion Lake, took a few pictures of it and then turned around.
Instead of walking back home, I decided to take the Bow River trail. This way, I could walk right next to the Bow River for a while. At the end of that trail, I could choose between either going back Downtown or following the trail to the Bow River Falls. My feet were definitely wet by now but I didn't want to turn back now since seeing some falls sounded quite promising.
Therefore I kept walking for a bit more than 1 km. In the end, I was happy that I did it - even though the Bow River Falls were not really deep, they were still very impressive.
Afterwards I really felt like I should walk back to the hostel. It was about 2.5 km from the falls and on the way, I still stopped in a few stops. The whole walk had taken me almost 3 hours and it was snowing the whole time.

Back at the hostel, I quickly got out of my wet shoes and socks and put on some really warm socks and shoes so that my feet would warm up.
I spent most of the afternoon just relaxing at the hostel.
Around 4 PM, I went out again and took a walk through the Downtown area. By now it wasn't snowing anymore. On my walk I checked out a few more gift stores and bought an abalone shell ring for myself. I also got a small precookedd meal (pollock and potato salad) at the supermarket before returning to the hostel once again.

Back in my hostel room, I met a new roommate, Sharon, who was actually from Bremen, too. We were both quite surprised about that. Another one of my new roommates, Nadine, was from Germany as well (somewhere close to Frankfurt) and she had planned to join the Moose Travel Tour tomorrow just like me.