Tuesday was our longest drive of the trip from Whistler to Jasper, just over 8 hours. We stopped for lunch and were pleased to find poutine on the menu at Wendy's! I'm a poutine convert, something about the combination of fries, gravy, and cheese curds just really hits the spot.
On Wednesday morning we checked out Maligne Canyon. I was not prepared for how awesome this place was going to be. It started out looking like a pretty normal hike in the woods, but my jaw literally dropped when we encountered the first canyon crossing.
It was impossible to get a picture of the whole canyon, it was so deep!
These pictures do not do it justice.
A Bridge Four shoutout to all my fellow Stormlight Archive fans
The rushing sounds and teal tint of the water, moss and trees covering every surface... I loved this place.
I also love this guy.
Aaron carried Isaac on his shoulders for at least 10 miles over the course of this trip.
We think that Isaac has a future as a personal trainer- he was always encouraging Aaron to go faster and jump off rocks.
We headed back to camp so that Isaac and Emmett (who had a weird one day fever) could nap. Lakin and I headed into town to do laundry. We decided to cook our spaghetti dinner at one of the many picnic areas in the national park and settled on Pyramid Island. I was worried the picnic areas would all be taken, but we had the little island mostly to ourselves!
He's a good little guy.
We managed to keep the kids only partially soaked as they played by the shore.
I hope I have many more years of children saying "Mom, take a picture of me with this rock/stick/flower!"
I love how kids help me slow down and notice the little wonders of the world.
The most majestic spaghetti straining of all time.
I feel like this picture really captures the Hays-Blood essence.
This might be my favorite picture that I took on this trip. All the other artsy ones were taken by Lakin.
Tree root kid jumble!
Isaac climbed up on this stump and started dancing his little heart out
We stayed in these things called oTENTiks in Jasper. We had to reserve them months in advance through this big lottery system. We logged in at 6:30am with every device in our houses and were assigned a random place in line for each device.
Throwback to oTENTiks reservation morning in March
We snagged two neighboring oTENTiks in Jasper, but all the Banff ones filled up, so we had to tent camp there. The oTENTiks were nice because they had comfy bunkbeds room to spread out and access to nice communal showers and bathrooms. It definitely felt like a break from the tent/outhouse life we were generally living.
So clean and spacious!
Far less clean and spacious!
There was a communal cook shelter in the campground that had a nest with four baby barn swallows!
I stacked these rocks and was proud of myself, so I asked someone to take a picture of me.
Oh dear, I am just like my children.
Our audio tour gave us much better information about Mount Edith Cavell than what was provided on this sign. Edith Cavell was a British nurse executed during WWI for helping Allied troops escape to friendly territory while serving in a Red Cross clinic behind enemy lines. The outrage around her execution was one of the events that pushed the US into entering the war. There are clinics and schools named after her around the world. She never set foot in Canada, but they named this super cool glacial mountain and lake after her.
The big glacier is in the back of this picture. If you are lucky, you get to see big chunks of it break off and cause tidal waves as they splash into the lake. We didn't have any of that kind of action while we were there, so we contented ourselves by playing with the mini icebergs floating in the lake.
Snacktime on the little penninsula
Toddler tantrums are the best
A better view of the glacier melting into the lake, featuring Elliot who is holding a cool rock.
A nice retired couple from Florida got to chatting with us. They took this picture for us and offered to use their filter to let us drink the glacier water! He refilled our water bottles with fresh, cold glacier melt. I also knelt down and used my hands to drink some straight from the stream just for the experience.
I may look bald, but at least I had fun with an ancient ice cube on a hot summer day.
Elliot invented the "get a rock to land on this iceberg" game. We got pretty good at it and worked our way up to skipping rocks to land on it.
This ended up being one of my favorite stops because we just hung out and experienced it more deeply instead of hiking through it. Kids, rocks, and water are always a successful match.
That night we had the best dinner of our children's lives- beavertails! They are like fry bread with dessert toppings. We had a side of poutine as well. They also offer poutine ON a beavertail and call it a "Poutail." We decided to pass on the poo-tails.
They were seriously delicious
For Annie, it was a full body immersive experience.
She is seriously the messiest eater.
The next morning we said goodbye to our lovely cabins. We stopped by Athabasca Falls on our way out of Jasper. This was possibly my favorite waterfall we saw because of how massive and forceful it was, and because we could get so close to it.
Elliot was getting tired of posing for pictures by this point
The river was really cutting through here! It was loud and full of spray.
Check out that rainbow!
The girls were pretending to be pika. The boys were probably talking about Zelda.
Robb on a little side quest
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