Day 12 : final day in jasper
After 4 days of exploring jasper it was high time we set off to see the rest of the west!
Back to jasper we go!
After waking up a bit later than we wanted we made a quick stop in Hinton to restock. Going from the Hinton airfield, where we slept, we made our way to the Jasper airfield to eat our breakfast before making our way back into jasper.
Rock climbing, Swimming and SHOWERS
It was one of the sub-goals of our trip to rock climb everywhere we went, having not gone yet, we made our way to the Jasper recreational center where we found a small but fun bouldering gym. We were a bit disappointed by the size, but the problems were fun, there was a pool where we cooled off and there where showers!
This was our first shower in a week! To say it felt amazing would be an understatement.
Elks of pyramid lake
Feeling completely refreshed we made our way to Pyramid Lake for lunch. Although we couldn’t find a place to eat, we found a whole family of elks cooling off in the lake!
They were majestic and not shy at all, chilling next to the kayakers, doing their thing.
Goodbye jasper
After lunch we said our goodbyes and made the decision to head back down the Icefield Parkway instead of heading straight west to try and avoid the wildfires of northern bc. this gave us the opportunity to stop at the places we didn’t have time on our first trip up. On our way back down the Parkway, we found a waterfall we hadn’t noticed on our way up! we took the opportunity to fill our water supplies in the fresh water of the snow runoff creek of the waterfall.
another one off the list
Continuing south along the parkway, we saw a few cars stopped on the side of the road. As we’d learnt the previous day, this could only mean one thing, wildlife was near ! And indeed it was, there was a group of mountain goats grazing on a cliff by the roadside.
This was a new species checked off our to-see list; so far we’ve seen a black bear, a coyote, a deer, big horn sheep and elks. There’s still so much to see !
Making our way to parker ridge
The absolute beauty of this highway will never get old, we were left in awe at every turn seeing the monolithic mountains piercing the sky while glaciers made their way into the bright blue rivers bellow. Along the way, we decided to hike up parker ridge; this relatively small but steep 4km hike took us up the ridge where we were rewarded with a magnificent sight of the two adjacent valleys. seeing the winding highway making its way through the mountains on one side and the Saskatchewan glacier making its way through the valley on the other was a truly spectacular sight.
Back to Abraham lake we go!
Midway through the parkway, we decided to head back to Abraham lake for the night. To make things different, we made our way to the other side of the lake where the water went from silty white to a tropical turquoise with white cliffs surrounding it. It was a completely different landscape than the first time we went here.
It was much windier at this end of the lake however. I guess being a 32km long lake makes for a fairly long corridor for the wind speed to pick up.
Blood Moon
With all the wind at the campsite, we decided to spend the evening in the car to work on the blog and some of the previous days’ photos. When the sun finally set, around 10:30 (the sun sets incredibly late in the “north”-west of Alberta!) we got out of the car and were surprised to see the nearly full moon tinted a rich blood red by all the smoke in the air !
