In Jasper National Park
Driving up north to Jasper from Banff we’re welcomed by the Columbia icefield and the Athabasca Glacier. It’s amazing to look up for glaciers or the traces of them. Jasper is bigger and less crowded, and there’s no highway cutting it in half. On second day there the smoke is back and the rain joins us too, these conditions don’t allow us to see Lake Maligne it its full beauty. Dubbed the most beautiful lake in the Canadian Rockies, it’s an Instagram famous, but for us it doesn’t look like much.
In the afternoon we head to Edith Cavell summit. There’s construction on the parking lot there so we had to get a permit to get there (we lined up at 7.15 in the morning to make sure we’d get it). It’s not raining anymore and the 7km walk treats us to amazing vistas on the Angel glacier. The mighty ice is perched on the mountain and pours water in a green pond full of icebergs. We gain 500m elevation as we walk and see the glacier in different angles. We can hear the ice cracking. We still didn’t see any grizzlies or caribous, but we saw many ground squirrels, marmots and pikas. The pikas call each others and it sounds like a squeaky dog toy. They run around, getting grass and pine branches for their nest. Cute! Even if we couldn’t see the summit hidden behind the clouds this hike turned out to be one of our favorites!
