Jasper, Maligne Lake, elk herds on the campground

Marlies WobbenAlberta3 Comments

ยป photo albums 2004/CANADA

Sept. 14th (part 2) – Jasper

When we drove back to the campsite, we had our first “animal jam”, awwww… A few cars had pulled off the road to take a picture from two elks near the road, and a few minutes later the animals slowly crossed the road. Everyone drives carefully around here, elks cross the roads daily (scary thought though). BTW, drivers in general are extremely nice here, they’ll stop for you if you’re even just thinking of crossing the road. And no honking when you’re blocking them with your RV for a moment (while turning for instance). In Holland they’ll honk for anything, people are so impatient there. Luckily it’s not so bad in the (not so hectic) south where we live, but still, the courtesy of the drivers here is a joy for us too. And in general people around here are much nicer everywhere you go!

Sept. 15th – Jasper, Maligne Lake

This morning we saw some elk cows passing through our area of the campground again, beautiful animals. I could hear a bull calling but it was far away. After a good breakfast (nice and greasy Canadian type of breakfast with eggs, bacon and sausages ๐Ÿ˜‰ we went to a shop in Jasper and then on our way to Maligne Lake. Close to Jasper there is a viewpoint where you can look over the Athabasca valley, then a little bit further there is a trail into the Maligne Canyon. We didn’t go in very far, it looked similar to the other canyons. This one had a trail next to the side of the canyon with several bridges where you have a good view into the canyon. Coming out we noticed the cougar warning for the area, oops! I do remember there recently was an incident with a cyclist coming eye to eye with a cougar near the Jasper Park Lodge (after the cougar tried to attack a few times the cyclist was able to scare him away by lashing out at him with his bicycle). Anyway, we continued our trip to Maligne Lake and the road was a very beautiful one. After little over 20 km we arrived at Medicine Lake. And there still was a lake, I was surprised! There are underground channels where the water disappears in (to reappear some kms downstream) and in the fall the lake disappears. Apparently that doesn’t happen until October so the water level was low but most of the lake was still there. And it was beautiful, we took some pics at the viewpoint at the beginning. At the end of the 6 km long lake we could see the water disappearing, there was just a lot of mud with a few streams. The Maligne Lake Road then follows the Maligne river upstream, crossing it a few times.

A couple of kms before we arrived at the lake we ended up in another animal jam where a lot people were outside of the car. I assume we weren’t so luckily to see a bear, because even though there are many stupid tourists that don’t listen to all the warnings, not this many people would step out I hope! It turned out to be a moose. Not an animal you should approach too closely either but he didn’t care much about the attention he was drawing. A few minutes later we arrived at Maligne Lake where I took a pic of that part of the lake with the boathouse. Like Medicine Lake it’s long and narrow, but here the road ends. You can take a boat tour to see more than half of the lake (total length is 22 km) up until the most photogenic spot in the Rockies: Spirit Island. We thought 35 bucks each was a bit expensive, so the postcards will have to do. But when you don’t take the tour, don’t hike along the shore and the mountains are partly in the clouds anyway, the view isn’t all that spectacular (compared to other lakes in the parks), so we didn’t stay long. But it was funny that we ran into our campground neighbours in the gift shop there ๐Ÿ™‚ So, back to Jasper we went. On this Maligne Lake Road there is a pretty good chance on seeing wildlife, so we kept looking into the woods all the time, but the moose was all we got. In Jasper we stopped for some groceries and we got back to the campground fairly early (around 4.30).

These few days we also wanted to take some time to enjoy the camping, but unfortunately it was raining at the foot of the mountain (we had fairly nice weather on our trip). Nico took a nap and I edited some of the many pics I made, we had dinner and afterwards went for a short stroll (it was already getting dark) to get some fresh air again. We heard an elk bull bugling very close, he turned out to be at the side of the Icefields Parkway (we’re maybe a few hundred metres away from it). We watched it for a while, in awe of his size, the size of his antlers (way bigger than the bull we had seen before!) and of his bugling – a whistle type of sound including grunts and ascending in pitch! Very impressive animals, so we shouldn’t bitch about not seeing a lot of wildlife. These elk make the stay on this campground very special and if they’re not around, we still see lots and lots of red squirrels here ๐Ÿ˜‰

Sept. 16th – Jasper

Again a relaxing day today. Apparently I kept Nico awake with my snoring (now where’s that saint smiley when you need one! ๐Ÿ˜‰ so I let him sleep in, while I continued to edit my gazillion digital pics in my pajamas. It’s vacation, eh?:) After a while we saw some elk cows passing through and when we were having breakfast we saw the bull (probably the one from last night!) passing by. We got out and at one point I was behind a few trees, but couldn’t get away from them when he turned and passed by me only a few metres away! After he went away we tried to continue our breakfast but the bull came back and he was bugling again – got the sound on film this time (but you can’t see the bull)! We followed them (he had at least eight cows with him!) until they all went to lay down. By now it was past noon, so we packed it up and went to the Jasper Tramway. From the lower terminal we already had a nice view on Jasper and we decided not to go up because the top of the mountain had been in the clouds most of the time. According to the info in the lobby there was 0-30% visibility. We decided to spend our money on a DVD of the Canadian Rockies instead. Then we went to Jasper again for our last website update up here at Kevin’s shop Coin Clean Laundry. Next update will probably be in three days or so when we are back in Banff.

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