Moose Tour part 2 - The Rockies
Day 9: Edith Cavell to Jasper
We left the hostel at about 9:30am and made the short drive up to Mount Edith Cavell, which is named after an English nurse who was executed by Germans during World War One for having helped allied soldiers escape from occupied Belgium into the Netherlands. A ten-minute walk along the Path of the Glacier Trail from the car park took us to a viewing place opposite the north face of the mountain, where we could see its three glaciers and Cavell Pond, the little green iceberg-dotted tarn at its base.
About half of the Ghost Glacier, a kilometre up near the 3363m summit, broke off at about 5:30am on 10th August 2012, crashing into Cavell Pond, creating a mini-tsunami and flooding the trail, car park, road and picnic area. One of the information boards gave the amount of ice that collapsed in terms of double-decker buses. I can't remember the number, but it was a lot. The fourteen-kilometre-long Mt. Edith Cavell Road was closed for the rest of the year (though it's closed in winter anyway because of its steepness), as was the hostel for a while... the manager at the time had slept through it and woke up to an evacuation. Since then, Parks Canada has stationed a warden of sorts in the area every day - we met one when he started his five-hour shift at 10am. Amazingly, we witnessed two "mini avalanches" (though I don't think they were, technically, avalanches), when chunks of ice in one of the wings of the Angel Glacier broke off, creating a hole. The noise was incredible, and the amount that fell was nothing compared to the Ghost Glacier so I can't imagine how loud that would have been.
Annoyingly, a bear was seen shortly after we left.
From the Angel Glacier we went to the "wicked" Maligne Canyon. The river was named for its turbulent waters, then everything associated with it was given the same name later (Lake, Canyon, Valley, Mountain...) Maligne Lake is the second-largest glacier-fed lake in the world but we didn't go there, instead taking a leisurely two-hour walk along the beautiful trail through the Canyon, along the river and through the forest to the picnic area at the end where we met the guide for lunch. The canyon was really cool: the river had worn the limestone down over fifty metres in some places but the gap between the sheer walls was narrow so sometimes we couldn't see the water.
The dark rainclouds behind mountains lit by sunshine, on the other side of a 'lake' that was the flooded Athabasca River, made for some really pretty views on the way to the hot springs, and we saw rainbows, elk and mule deer. The male elk was in the river on the other side of the road, and we slowed down a little as the other traffic had, but some people were even getting out of their cars despite it being a highway. A lot of them seemed to be getting rather closer to the huge antlered animal than they should have. More people are killed by elk and moose than by bears.
Miette Hot Springs is the hottest in the Rockies. Unlike the stream near Tofino, it's basically a hot open-air swimming pool, with rectangular tiled pools, an entrance fee, changing rooms with lockers and showers, and lots of people. We'd each contributed fifty dollars to the food budget on the first day in Banff and we used what was left over, after two breakfasts, three lunches and two dinners for twelve people, to get in. There are four pools with different temperatures. The natural spring water is fifty-four degrees Celcius, cooled to forty in one pool and thirty-eight in the other. I was surprised how much of a difference two degrees makes. Then there are two icy plunge pools, one colder than the other, which we took a couple of dips in. Despite being obviously quite commercial, it was a nice way to relax for an hour after the last couple of days, and the views of the Fiddle Valley were nice.
The hostel in Jasper is located about seven kilometres out of town. There were forty-four beds in the mixed dorm there, but we were put at the back of a smaller side-dorm so it wasn't so open. We all went gratefully for showers (after two nights with no running water) though with only three female showers in the whole seventy-two-bed hostel, we had to queue. Afterwards we all took two taxis into town for dinner at a pub, where I had a cheap but really good burger with chips. We left after midnight, saying goodbye to four of the group who were "hopping off" and staying in Jasper for a couple more days.
We got a last bit of amusement before sleeping, when someone else in the side-dorm started snoring loudly. If I'd been on my own I would have ignored it, but the other girls' stifled giggling had me shaking with silent laughter, even more so when one of them prodded Jordan (one of the two guys in the group) awake. He took his earphones out and listened for a moment, then sat up with "What the f*** is that?" and burst into laughter himself.
We settled down when some kind or tired soul woke the snorer up and he stopped.
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