Tuesday 18th April – So much to see around Jasper

Steam train on Connaught Drive, Jasper

Those who know me well will know that I love a good map.  Well, here we’d been given a fantastic book full of maps.  With different sections showing all of the trails and points of interest between Jasper and Banff in great detail.  The planning part of my brain went into over-drive!  But our first port of call this morning was Jasper town and the Visitors Centre for some information, which turned out to be a good thing (as always).  Our first chosen location of the day, the Miette hot springs, were closed for the season.  In fact, the entire road leading to them from Pocahontas was shut due to snow. But never fear, there was plenty more to see and explore around Jasper, so that’s what we did.  There’s a gimmick in the parks here where they place red chairs at points they feel are particularly scenic, encouraging you to make yourself comfortable and enjoy the view.  There were seven of these points in and around Jasper and that felt like a good aim for the day, to try and visit them all.  However, I was feeling under-prepared for the snow exposure that we were inevitably going to experience today.  Jo and I had invested in matching natty woollen mitten/gloves from Walmart, so the only part of me that was still feeling cold was my head.  This issue was solved this morning when we visited some gift shops and I was persuaded that a woollen bear hat, complete with protruding nose and ears and buttons for eyes was the right product.  It will be making many appearances in the forthcoming photographs!

We started off locally, at Lakes Edith and Annette.  Especially as we found our first pair of red chairs by Lake Edith (right).   We next took Maligne road as the staff in the Visitor’s centre weren’t sure how far you could get down it in an RV at the moment and that sounded like a challenge!

The view from the red chairs at Lake Edith

They're some big paw-prints... we're guessing wolf but sadly we didn't see one

Our red chair theory took a knocking when we found the next ones by a river (above).  Okay, so we were in the Canadian Rockies so it’s never not great, but we’ve seen a lot better views than that! 

Medicine Lake... or river through the ice as it currently is

Medicine lake half an hour after the photo above

Including our next location – Medicine lake (without red chairs!), named as such by the Indians because they believed it was magic and feared it.  The level changes by up to 20 meters a year due to a network of underground passages.  In summer, the underground system can’t cope with the volume of meltwater from the mountains and so the lake forms above.   But in winter, the inflow is less than the drainage into the caves and so the lake disappears . We stopped here for lunch and watched as the clouds cleared from the peaks in the distance.  The views here change so rapidly (right). 

We proved those nay-sayers at the VC wrong by making it all the way to the end of the road to Maligne lake:

Not that we could see much of the lake through the masses of snow.  Inevitably, the stop disintegrated into a snowball fight.  Heading back up the same road there were still new sights to behold.  Maligne canyon was quite impressive but these pictures don’t do justice to how deep it felt whilst standing over it. The best feature being the completely frozen waterfall raising the question ‘how cold does it have to be for fast-flowing water to freeze still?!’ 

Maligne canyon

A bridge across to give you an idea of scale

Frozen waterfall

We travelled a distance east, despite knowing we would be turning back on ourselves, but the views weren’t quite the same.  However, on our way back we spotted a herd of elk by a parking area and took advantage of their confident nature to get up nice and close, even seeing a couple of the younger males lock horns to have a practise ‘tussle’. 

Handsome Elk stag - do you think he knew he was on camera?!

Not wanting the views to end, especially as the skies had cleared, we continued up a winding road behind Jasper town itself, to stunning Patricia Lake (below) where Si and Stu dared to see how think the ice was! Before making it to the top of the hill to Pyramid Lake for a short hike up to some more red chairs.

What could possibly go wrong?  Si and Stu test out the ice...

Pyramid Lake... the light was fading by this point

The light was starting to fade and it had been a really long day.  We parked up in Jasper just along the road from a bar and went to grab a bite to eat.  We had decided this would be a good opportunity as one of Alberta's hockey teams, The Edmonton Oilers, had a Stanley Cup tie so the atmosphere should be great down the local.....  Until the Oilers started losing badly, the locals all started leaving and the final score was a 7-0 loss!  But the food and beer was lovely.  It was also tipping it down outside.  

Our campsite didn’t have any running water, so Jo and I made a dash to a tap on the high street to fill up the tank.  Not ideal in the rain and the dark, but we managed, before picking up the lads and heading back to the same campsite as last night.