A Day of Sights @ Jasper National park

We woke up to our cold campsite eager to get on the road for a day of sight-seeing. The plan was to drive up to Jasper along the Ice Fields Parkway and stop at scenic lookouts along the way. We started with a quick detour to the Paint Pots.

We arrived at the trailhead before anyone else and a did a small but pretty hike that led us over a bridge, across a windy wooden trail and up a small stream to three large puddles that are colloquially known as the Pain Pots. The soil around the Paint Pots is high in iron meaning that the landscape looks closer to a terraformed Martian landscapes than something you’d find on this planet.

Next stop was the famous Lake Louise. We were again granted the motorcycle privilege to cut the line for parking. Now at the lake, we were surrounded by tourists shipped in by full sized coach buses running every few minutes. If we thought Emerald Lake was crowded this was something else! Adam was feeling hangry from skipping breakfast and Helen’s crowd anxiety was rising as the natural beauty of Lake Louise began to fade behind the amusement park feel of it all. So we took the obligatory Banff couples photo and B-lined it back to our bikes content to go somewhere else. 

We got a quick bite to eat in the village nearby and added our 4th sitcker to the top box:

Next was a drive across the Ice Fields Parkway, a long stretch of blissful Canadian highway lined with glaciers older than the road itself. We stopped at the Athabasca glacier which is slowly receding into the mountain. In 15 minutes we hiked from its foot print in 1992 to the base of the glacier:

Thinking the day couldn’t get any better, we pulled over to the “Big Lick” a hill that mountain goats frequent for its salt content. We saw several goat families getting their sodium in.

The day ended with Helen setting up camp while Adam made a quick run to get beer so we could both enjoy a cold beer and good food by the fire. The only thing left to do was to decide our hike tomorrow!