Wasa (Wazza) Lake

Back into British Columbia, this time in the south on our way to Montana.

Dirt cliffs. Awesome. But I might leave the climbing to someone else.

After our experience of having a nice picnic in Jasper where we cooked Pizzas by the stream, we looked for somewhere to try cooking nacho's over the fire. The challenge was on.

The air mattress that would not stay up all night was going to give us our money's worth, one way or another and after feeling that the water was almost "Australian Warm", I pumped it up.

We couldn't find a fire pit anywhere, so we tried to work out a way to do it on the gas stove. Cheese didn't melt properly but it was still kind of nice.

Luckily for Olivia, she doesn't like melted cheese on them.

We weren't the only people enjoying the lake. We don't have many lakes like this in Australia. There are a lot of them here and most of them look like Crystal Lake from the Friday the 13th films. (Warning: Olivia's class should NOT watch any of these films.)

The speed boats provided some surprise waves to ride.

Lake Louise

This place was not too bad except that we didn't have a fire pit in the camp. We did have some squirrels though. What a surprise. Olivia decided to walk around and practice her photography.

Eventually I had to take things into my own hands.

Unlike Jasper camp ground where we also didn't have a fire pit, the Lake Louise camp ground at least had a shelter with a big oven thing in it. We cooked up some corn and had fun with the fire.

The next day we walked to the back of the lake and I set up a top rope for Olivia.

She managed to do fairly well

The most impressive thing that the Japanese tourists seem to get a photo of themselves with is not the lake, but the nearly 100 year old hotel that would never be allowed to be built these days. It is quite a large and nice hotel and the lake is amongst the most impressive around, but it is that there is a hotel so out of place that makes it look so picturesque.

Jasper

It was a long way to jasper the next day and the terrain changed many many times.

As we got closer to the Alberta border we were looking for mount Robson which is the highest point in the Canadian Rockies. It was then that we had a McKinley moment. A McKinley moment is when you are looking for a big mountain such as Mt McKinley (the tallest mountain in the world) and someone in the car is are asking if that one is it, or this one or maybe that one over there, and then you turn around the corner and see the real one.

We moved from British Columbia to Alberta, the next Canadian province east.

As you can see, all of the signs are also in French, even though most all of the French can speak English and only a few of the English speaking Canadians also know French.

Jasper is full of Elk and we saw one on the way in.

And another one in our camp site.

Maligne Canyon is a very interesting place where there is a 20m deep ravine that is only a few meters wide.

Would an Olympic long jumper make the distance? I know that they would want to. Ouch.

One of the children eating while their "Mother" looks on.

Down stream, the white water is less deadly but probably still freezing.

This lake was crazy cold and after taking two running dives into it, I was done. Olivia and many locals spent a fair bit of time in the water.

We finally found a picnic spot that had a firepit where we could cook pizza for Shannon and I and spaghetti for Olivia. It is her current go-to meal.

The water here was cold enough to make the esky stay cold and make your feet ache in about 20 seconds but it isn't very often that you get to eat pizza in a nice river.

Did someone say "human food?"

We took a nice drive out to Malign Lake. Really nice drive and the rock up there looked very nice for climbing, depending on the quality.

While driving along, we spotted people who looked like they had spotted something. It is called 2nd hand critter spotting. We stopped and watched as the mother and cub black bear walked along eating grass.

Strange that she could have simply turned on one of the people chasing her way too closely with cameras and gained 10 times the number of Calories in just a few seconds. "Hey, a bear is trying to cross the road with her cub. How about we try to cut her off. What could go wrong?"

A kilometer later, we saw more people seeing something. I said to Shannon that this bear must be bigger because the photographer was actually looking a bit cautious.

A full grown male black bear walks along with all the confidence of something that could rip apart anything in its way, especially soft pink things in those big metal bear boxes.

Maligne lake was pretty special looking except that we arrived too late to hire a canoe. One might be excused for thinking that in a place where it stays light until 10:30pm, you might be able to paddle around after 5pm.

The drive back from the lake showed a plethora of big walls to be climbed. I haven't found anything on the web yet. That might mean a few first ascents waiting to be done.

Oh, that's right. There was another bear on the way back. This one looked like an adolescent.

The next day we headed south towards Lake Louise along the Icefield Parkway. A bunch of glaciers coming down from the Columbia Icefield up above.

Waterfalls area always interesting, even after the 50th one.

This one was better than most that we have seen and we were able to walk up to the upper section.

This is the Athabasca Glacier

In Canada, they don't have junior ranger programs, the have Xplorer Canada. She is also now one of those for Jasper National Park.