Set off for Maligne Canyon and Medicine Lake after breakfast in town. Not as big a waterfall as the Athabasca, a smaller river, but a spectacular chasm, really deep with a complicated history going back millions of years. Met an English couple on the walk around the site ‘bit disappointed that we haven’t seen any wildlife’. We carried on to Medicine Lake; it’s a bit like the arithmetic questions we used to get in school ‘if it takes 5 mins to fill a bath and 10 mins to empty it how long will it take to fill if the tap is on and the plug out?’. The base of Medicine Lake has a load of sink holes which drain the water into underground passages. During the summer and winter it progressively empties but the spring melt waters fill it faster than it can empty, the net effect is a water rise of up to 20m. Impressive. Just along the road we entered an ‘animal jam’, cars stopped to admire the wildlife. A family of Bighorn sheep were occupying the road. They were incredibly tame; one even investigated the inside of our car while the door was open. They were also pretty savvy, the laybys either side had notices warning drivers not to feed the wildlife, no sign at this layby though! Later, on the way to Pyramid Lake, we saw a Mule Deer grazing on the trees beside the road; he had a good set of antlers (see picture). Perhaps the rainbow we saw over Jasper was a lucky omen. In Jasper we came across the Jasper and Yellowhead Heritage Centre so just had to visit. It’s a bit bigger than Clydach but we got a few ideas in exchange for translating a local hill name for the duty volunteer. Llysfran had been spotted as wrong by a previous visitor, it should have been Llysyfran. The volunteer was pleased to know it translated as Court of the Crows (ravens might be a bit better because we’ve seen quite a few of those). Unfortunately we don’t know how the Welsh connection was made. Marilyn Monroe featured in a film called River of No Return; this film was made in the Jasper area in 1953. A whole room in the Centre is dedicated to verbatim tales of local residents’ meetings with her; apparently they all thought she was a really pleasant and approachable person. The gilt on today’s cake was seeing the Rocky Mountaineer in the station, it had just arrived from Kamloops. Took the opportunity to get the trainspotter’s pics which I had missed because we got into Calgary in the dark.
Posted on: Sun, 22 Sep 2013 02:35:57 +0000