WEDNESDAY 27TH – MADE IT TO JASPER

Well here we are again, tucked away in a delightful camp site in the forest. Believe it or not, we are one of 781 campers in the completely full Whistlers Campground at Jasper but the camp ground is so large and so well set out that, apart from a couple of nearby neighbours in their own bush settings, we could be here on our own.

Today was a day of water and rock. We checked out the remaining two attractions of note on the Icefields Parkway being the Sunwapta Falls and the Athabasca Falls before arriving in Jasper, a delightful town with some quite quaint features.

This isn’t really the fire station but it obviously once was and caught my attention.

After restocking the cellar and visiting the Laundromat to do the washing, we went to Maligne Canyon where the Maligne River flows through incredibly deep and narrow sandstone gorges that it has carved out of the landscape. The picture can’t really tell the story.

Well that’s it. We’ve done the Rockies and they exceeded our expectations at almost every turn. Tomorrow we head west to hopefully find some bears in the wild to photograph. That’s the aim of the exercise. Everywhere we go has bear warnings and apparently, three people were killed by bears last year and quite a number were injured so they seem to be in Canada what sharks or snakes are to us in Australia.

On a positive note in relation to animal sightings, we finally did see an animal in the wild this afternoon at Maligne Canyon. It was a mule deer trotting along the track.