Wed. 16th September ’26
This
morning we are off to explore Maligne Lake which is a 50 minute drive from town down a no through road, so everyone heading that way has one route in and one route out. This includes RVs (like camper vans but bigger) of all shapes and sizes. As an aside, I will mention we considered hiring an RV but are glad we decided against it as they are hard work to drive and taking them into the small parking lots would be a pain. Also, Dave and I would not have agreed over how big/small a camper van to rent!! A car is much easier to get around in and to park. Although we are at the end of the season everywhere is still busy enough and parking spaces not always easy to find. Summer must be chaotic with queues everywhere. Everywhere we go we see a large number of camper vans squeezed into small, overcrowded car parks and trundling slowly down narrow windy roads.
So, we head out of Jasper in our (very dirty) Nissan Kicks, which is easy to drive, if a bit sluggish in overtaking, and which does fit into small parking spaces. Once we reach the lake we head past the touristy bit where the boat trips leave from and park at the far car park where our lake walk starts from. We head along the shore on a path with an advisory notice it is unmaintained and may be muddy as well as to beware of elks. This seems to have deterred a number of people and we have the path to ourselves, except for the swarms of mossies who take a liking to Dave’s legs as he decided on shorts today.
As well as boat trips to Spirit Island there are the usual red canoes to hire which we see being paddled up and down the lake so we try again for the iconic picture of red canoe, blue water and mountain backdrop and were more successful than yesterday. When the lakeside path ends, we head inland and wonder if we may spy some elk from a distance. The path winds its way through the trees passing a few grassy hollow but no elks were spotted. All too soon we are back at the busy car park, although we saw no more than a dozen walkers on the trail.
On the drive back to town we stopped at Medicine Lake lookout. This is an interesting lake as there is no visible reason that the water level falls in autumn. It was found that the water drains away from below into the world’s largest unnavigable kaarst system of tunnels. Apparently, they tried unsuccessfully to stop the lake from draining by putting magazines, sand bags and mattresses on the lake bed. The lake then refills in the spring with water from the surrounding melted Glaciers. It was called Medicine Lake for the mystical disappearing water.
We had a whole itinerary for the afternoon but as we did not get back to town until 14:30 so we retired to the Bears Paw cafe for a cup of tea and enormous raspberry and chocolate scone each. That put pay to any more exertion until our trip out for sunset. We moved to a new room, thank you Agoda, which was “partial basement” but not as bad as it sounded. We had delayed our afternoon trip to Pyramid Island until after dinner so we could be there for sunset. It was a lovely little walk round the Island but little colour in the sky and the sun set out of sight behind the mountains. We did manage a few pictures of the sun shining on the mountain tops which made the trip out worthwhile.