Day 126: Jasper National Park

August 18, 2014

We updated the blog from yesterday with more information and pictures

This morning was rather cool at 44 degrees which was nice after the too warm day we had yesterday. The high today was about 74 and smokey. It would have been a bright sunny day if it hadn't been for all the smoke.  We couldn't find out where the smoke was coming from at the campground kiosk but looked on line and there appears to be several large fires in our area.  Hope the smoke blows out of here soon.  The forecast for tomorrow is for rain so maybe that will help the firefighters.

Smoky mountains

This morning we had a great breakfast of French Toast cooked outside with some of our recently purchased breads. MMMM good. We then did some hiking and geocaching in the campground. The park service put out 5 geocaches and will loan you a GPS receiver if you want to try to find them. We found all five. 

After that we went to Athabasca Falls. Very powerful and pretty water fall. Currently there is so much glacial runoff that the water is milky. We are told that when the glacier re-freezes and there is just runoff filling the river the falls are a pretty blue color, but of course not nearly as big and powerful. We have some videos of the falls we will try to post when we have better connectivity. You really can't appreciate the size in a still photo.

We had asked at the campground kiosk for recommended hikes. One recommendation was Valley of 5 Lakes hike. She said it was a pretty easy, flat hike and the paper she gave us stated it was a 4.5km – about 2.5 miles - loop trail. Allow 1-2 hours. It also said the highlight of the hike was the different colors of the 5 lakes due to differences in depth. Sounded good to us so off to the trail head we went. One of us actually thought it might not really be challenging enough, but decided to go see the lakes anyway. We hiked and hiked. Some pretty stiff climbs and descents. Really thought we should be finishing the hike because we had hiked almost 2 hours and it seemed like we were still pretty far from the truck. We then came to a sign – 6.5 km back the way we came and 5 km more the way we were heading. Hey! Told you we had already walked more than 4 km. So what we thought was going to be an easy 2.5 mile hike ended up being about a 6 mile hike. In itself the 6 mile hike wasn't a problem but it was not in our plans time-wise today. We had already hiked 2 miles in the campground. Oh well – just changed the supper menu to something that wouldn't take as long to prepare.  Otherwise it was a really nice hike.  Pretty lakes, nice trail.  

The trail

One of the five lakes

Loon

Angry elk

So now we are at Tim Horton's in Jasper  to get this posted.  On the way into town we saw a Mama Elk and her baby.  Will post tomorrow if the picture turned out.  It was getting dark so not sure it will look good.  Expect all three of us to sleep well tonight.