Its Summer time - hike in Jasper 3 June

1 June is the official first day of summer. Except for the 3 day heat wave though we’ve barely got out of warm gear. We’ve had a few walks of an afternoon in shorts and t-shirts, but mostly it’s too cold of an afternoon to go out without a jumper. It’s also Ian’s first day at work! No longer the stay at home house husband able to sit and admire the wildlife in the park across the road at lunch time! We took our first excursion to watch the local Crackercats baseball just across the road at the Telus field (they thrashed the Calgary Vipers).

We headed out to Jasper on Saturday 3 June-started with the Valley of the 5 lakes walk just south of Jasper. It’s only a 4.2 km return but we got a little lost and back tracked about an extra 1 ½ kms. It is true that Jenny was navigating at the time we got lost,,, but in her defence she was actually on the right path – it just wasn’t a very well worn one!! In the afternoon we drove out to Pyramid Lake and Patricia Lake. On the way we came across several male and female Elk – the male had huge horns and we were careful not to get too close!!
We’d earlier set up camp in our new flash tent that we can now stand up in!,,, AND we have a new foam mattress. So we are camping in sheer LUXURY! Tonight we went in to the Jasper Brew Pub for a delicious meal of Crawdads (a thing kind of like a prawn tail) and calamari. On Sunday 4 June we got ready to hike the 9.6km return hike to Sulphur Skyline. We loaded up the bear mace, bells and newly bought ‘Bear Bangers”, but seeing as we weren’t exactly sure what to do with them or how to use them Jenny made doubly sure by checking with the nearby park ranger (MUCH to Ian’s disgust! Of course he had it all worked out!) who was also just packing his bear mace to walk to the summit aswell. The last push up to the summit is bloody horrible. The wind is blowing the pack of our backs and biting cold. We had planned to have a nice lunch on the top but only stayed about 10 mins as it was too windy and cold. At the top are VERY bold gold barred ground squirrel. They were humoring Ian by licking his pack – then they tried to steal my camera out of my pack – very cheeky indeed! It’s been another long weekend – our 4th in a row in the Rockies!