Jasper National Park
Trip Start
Aug 19, 2005
1
16
57
Trip End
Jun 12, 2006
Jasper - The Rockies, Alberta, Canada
Sunday, September 25, 2005
As we drove along the mountains got taller and more snow capped, just like the pictures. We got to Jasper not long after lunch checked into the hostel and went to the Tramway up the mountain. We only had to wait 20 minutes to go up - amazingly quick... We were about to go up when we were warned that we only had an hour and oh by the way there is a storm coming in.... Nice to know when you are about to go up to the top of a mountain. We got to the top of the tramway, we climbed a little way until the snow got really slippy and the winds got rather high. We did do a snow angel as well as build a snowman and had my photo taken with a Chinook.
After our decent we went to explore the town itself - two main streets and lots of souvenir stores. After dinner we weren't quite ready to go home so we found a bar and sat for a few drinks. There was a football game on between the New York Giants and the San Diego Chargers. We watch right to the end. Neither of us really knew what was going on but the lovely bar tender answered one or two questions for us throughout the game.
The following morning was an early start. It was cold but we went out to Maligne Canyon and hiked for a few km before returning up the hill to the car. Man was it cold. We drove from here out to the Medicine lake, a lovely little area, before returning to route 93 to begin our journey to Banff. We stopped at the Annabasca Falls and did the trail there and also stopped at the Surwapta Falls.
From there we continued down the 93 until we came to the Columbia Icefields. Stacey gave me two options of going up to the glacier. Option one - park in the car park and walk up to the base in the freezing cold rain / hail stones. Option two - get the bus from the car park up to the SnowMobile and be driven onto the glacier, get out and walk around on the glacier if desired and be driven back. Well have a guess what we did - we go the bus - $32 later. It was good though. We were driven down a steep (32%) incline as the snowmobile driver had some fun with us as we searched for the seatbelts that weren't there. It was really really cold on the glacier and the wind was bitter but we did get to drink out of the stream of youth!!! I'm looking so youthful these days. We took a few photos before getting back into the warm snowmobile to get back to the bus.
After we dried off and warmed up a bit we continued down the 93 for some more fun. Read Banff National Park for that bit.....
