JASPER

Joelle McDonald
Jul 21, 2024
17 min read

A note to begin: We had planned to visit Jasper from July 18-24, but on the 22nd at 10:00 PM, we and everyone else in the town and park received a “Go Now” evacuation order due to a powerful wildfire burning toward town. Since then, many structures in the town of Jasper have been destroyed and miles of forest has burned. While fire is a vital part of healthy forest ecosystems, it is also heartbreaking when it burns through community. We connected with Jasper’s community more than anywhere else we’ve travelled recently, and we are so sad to see pieces of it lost. We are grateful to have gotten to see Jasper in its last days before being forever changed. It was, and always will remain, an incredible place.

Thursday, Driving the Icefields Parkway

Jasper is a very remote national park and you have to drive for hours in any direction to get to a real population center. To get to Jasper from Calgary, we head north through Banff onto a famous road called the Icefields Parkway. This road shows its remoteness, with only one gas station and a seasonal 1 kilometer of cell coverage on the entire four hour route. What the road lacks in services, it more than makes up for in beauty. This is said to be one of the most beautiful roads in the world, and I am willing to believe it. The road runs through a river valley with dramatic mountains rising in all directions. Bright blue lakes come one after another. Enormous glaciers stretch down the sides of mountains toward the road. We climb over a mountain pass, passing what looks like a search and rescue helicopter along the way. Scary. Once we are over the pass, the landscape opens into a wider valley with a river delta just inches below the road. Finally, we reach our first Jasper sign, greeting us with a “Bienvenue”.

Friday, A Day in Town

Though it feels like we just did laundry, somehow we are running out of clean clothes and today is HOT. Camping is amazing because it means being outside is the rule, not the exception. With that said, 97° feels a lot hotter when you have nowhere to escape to. With the temperature and our laundry in mind, we head into town and find a very cute laundromat/coffee shop combo to spend a few cooler hours in. Two hours later, we leave with clean clothes in hand and do a little walk-about town. The energy is similar to Estes Park, but we avoid the tourist shops and instead find boxed mac and cheese that I can eat. That may sounds like a small thing, but I have been looking for this illusive foody grail for years. We also stop by the visitor information center. We haven’t actually done much research about what to do here, and we figure asking someone local saves us a lot of effort and gets us way cooler recommendations than the internet.

After our lap of town, we are desperate to get out of the heat, so we find the library. No better place for free wifi, AC, and a comfortable couch. We catch up on our blog-writing until closing time at 5:00, when the sun is still beating down. Despite spending three hours in AC today, we are both feeling weak and addled from the heat. Back at our campsite, Hannah rallies us to go to the neighboring campsite for a storytelling and song presentation about the Rocky Mountain Cree by a tribe member. I’d been really excited for the talk when I saw it advertised this morning, but now I just want to sit until it’s under 80°. After gratefully blasting AC for the five minute drive and walking to the camp theater, we realize that tonight is actually a performance by a local musician. Oops. The Rocky Mountain Cree presentation is tomorrow… We stay for a few songs and to peek at the enormous elk herd eating dinner nearby. Our first elk of the trip! While we are there, we learn this little concert is the kick-off of Jasper Park Weekend. There will be events put on and subsidized by the non-profit Friends of Jasper over the next two days. We immediately sign-up for three on Sunday. Finally, the sun’s glare lets up just enough to manage making dinner and setting up camp for the night.

Saturday, Edith Cavell and Parks Weekend

Yesterday at the visitor information center, we asked someone from Parks Canada what hike he would do if he was only able to do one in Jasper, and he said Edith Cavell mountain. Today, we are jumping straight to it. We start bright and early, hoping to be done before the heat gets really bad today and guaranteeing a competitive parking spot. This hike is back down the Icefields Parkway a few miles, then up a windy mountain road that saves us a lot of feet of elevation gain on our hike. Thank you road! As we drive, Mt Edith Cavell rises impressively over the horizon. We eat breakfast in the parking lot (we really wanted to be sure to get parking, so we cook our oatmeal in the lot), staring up at the peak before beginning our climb.

The hike starts out straight up on a steep slope of pavement that is laid over an area somewhat recently exposed by glacial retreat. The base of the hike is filled with the young beginnings of a forest taking over the glacier’s former footprint. The glacier has retreated to its current home, which is high above in a low point between two tall peaks. Its melt creates a small waterfall below it, which flows into a vividly blue pond. As we hike, we can hear the ice and snow cracking on the glacier and mountain opposite us. We are keeping our fingers crossed to see an avalanche, which a few people said they saw in the last week on AllTrails. Every time we hear a distinct crrrrrrrack echo through the valley we freeze and look at the ice but are never lucky enough to see anything. Along the trail, there are countless wildflowers. Signs tell us that, each summer, they only have six weeks to bloom and set seeds for next year because of their high alpine home. They receive a lot of respect for their strength and beauty. We see our first pika of the trip on our hike back down. EEK SO EXCITING! Every time we have seen a rodent-type animal, I hoped it was a Pika, so this is big.

Back from our hike, we decide to go back into town where Friends of Jasper has set up a bunch of tents for Park Weekend. We are expecting something like a farmers market with local shops and information but are greeted with a poorly attended field of just a few tents. Jasper is pretty tiny and very remote so maybe our expectations were off base. We get postcards from a local photographer and give some feedback to Parks Canada about our Jasper experience before heading into the library. We bask in the AC as we use the library computer to post our Glacier and Waterton Lakes blogs.

We return to our campsite for pasta night, a true celebration for Hannah on our trips. Usually it is our easy meal, but camp cooking makes it our most involved. By the end, we decide to skip the Rocky Mountain Cree talk that we tried to attend was last night. We have a big day planned for tomorrow and need to rest up!

Sunday, Parks Weekend Activities

Remember how we signed up for a bunch of events when we heard about them at our accidentally-attended concert? Well, today is the day to do them! We have a busy day ahead of us making indigenous medicine bags, doing a guided medicinal plant walk, and then a guided hike to learn about beaver habitat.

Our first activity is in the community arts center, which is inside the library’s building. Leave it to us to find a way to spend a few hours in the library’s AC, even when it’s closed on a Sunday. We meet Matricia Bauer, or Iskatochitawachiy by her indigenous name, who runs lots of workshops and events to share her Cree heritage. She introduces us to the concept of medicine bags, which is not the first aid kit equivalent we expected. Instead, we learn it is more like a first aid kit for the mind, body, and spirit. This means, rather than containing things like bandages and remedies, it is meant to hold treasured items that care for your personhood as a whole. We are given a stack of moose hide cutouts to pick from for the base of our bag, with a long leather strip to sew along the edges with. Matricia is a trapper and uses all of the parts of the animals she catches, so she also lets us pick an antler cross cut, a piece of fur, and a sea urchin barb to use on our bags. She encourages us to pick a rock as well so that our bags have something from the land and the sea. She teaches us the basic technique and lets our imaginations run. After two hours of happy concentration, everyone's bag looks very different, and everyone would gladly spend a few more hours of focus on their work. Busy hands make a calm mind.

After we finish our bags, we have a few hours before our medicine walk, which we spend reading in the shaded shoreline of Pyramid Island on Pyramid lake. The smokey air hazes over any view we may have had, but looking down, we can see straight to the lake's bottom. We pass some time on the bridge to the island spotting schools of small fish, speeding about in unison.

Our medicine walk takes us a bit outside of town to the Sixth Bridge of Maligne Canyon. Here, the river is wide and flat, and the canyon walls are over a mile upstream. We don't mind because today we aren't here for the canyon. We meet our guide, a Cree guy working for his mom's traditional medicine company, beside the river. Our guide makes an offering of tobacco. A gift must always be given when taking anything from the Earth, even if—as is the case today—you are taking only knowledge. After crossing the bridge, our education in medicinal plants begins. Here are some of the highlights:

Buffalo berries are the number one cause of bear attacks. In the spring, when the bears are first emerging from hibernation, they are so hungry that they eat for 23 hours a day and focus so much on these berries that their other senses become dulled. This means it is really easy to surprise a bear eating buffalo berries, driving them to attack.
Wolf willow seeds were and still are commonly used for beads in Indigenous art. The seeds themselves are very hard, but they were boiled in stomachs or bladders that had been stretched or dried into bowls and filled with water and hot rocks. This process softened the seeds and made them larger so they could be worked onto a thread. As the seeds dried, they would harden into durable beads.
Broadleaf Plantains can be used to treat itchy bug bites, and their seeds were used for bread once ground up into a nutritious flour.
Yarrow can repel mosquitos and other unwanted bugs, stop a wound from bleeding with its flowers, and can help push a number of illnesses and toxins out of the body. It does, however, look a lot like hemlock, which is very poisonous.
Rose hips grow after roses have finished blooming. They are sweeter if you harvest them after a frost, and they can be added to pine and spruce tea to improve the flavor. However, be warned, they are also called "itchy bum berries" because, if you eat them as they grow, they will get stuck just before your colon and cause you to itch for days...
Aspen trees were used to provide sunscreen (the white dust on their bark is protective) and yeast for bread. It is also commonly known that aspen trees can provide pain relief. What surprised us, however, is that the tree was used to heal broken bones. The bark would be wrapped around the bone after it was set and heated so it contracted, making a cast. Since the cast was made of the bark, it would also release pain relief directly into the break. If an arm or leg bone was shattered, the limb would be cut open and all the bone shards would be removed. Then, the straightest possible aspen branch would be set between the remaining bone on either side of the shatter before the wound was sewn back up. Over time, the bone would regrow over the branch, and the branch would break down in the body. This way the bone would be healed without anything non-human left inside. Sounds better than pins! The process was so painful that the wounded person would be given a medicine that would either knock them unconscious for days or kill them. For that reason, it was called warrior medicine, only to be given if death was definite without it.
Douglas Fir trees are fire resistant because of their thick bark. As the story goes, there was once a wildfire coming and, by the time the mice woke up and realized what was happening, all the animals had already left. This meant there was nobody for them to ride upon to safety. A Douglas Fir offered them safety within its bark. This is why when you see a Douglas Fir pinecone you will be able to see the hindlegs and tail of mice scurrying inside.

Our medicine walk ends a bit early, giving us enough time to make it to our guided beaver hike meet-up spot comfortably early. We wait patiently, but as our 5:00 PM start time comes and goes with no one else at the meet-up point, we worry we are in the wrong place and may have missed it. Hannah bravely chases down a group that looks like they may be going on a hike, but they are just strangers. I then seek out the nearby headquarters for Friends of Jasper to inquire about the hike, only to be told that it was cancelled due to heat and smoke and I should have gotten an email. Oops. One of the challenges of being very unengaged with technology during our weeks in the woods. The people working in the office kindly draw out a map for me so Hannah and I can go on our own if we want to see the habitat, but they recommend waiting until it cools down. It is hard to communicate just how oppressive the heat is now. I report back to Hannah, and we find a smoothie shop with AC to cool down our insides and outsides while we make a new plan. It just so happens that there is one more Friends of Jasper activity this weekend: a paint-along back in the air conditioned library, starting in an hour. It's too late to reserve a spot, so we make our way there with the hope of two more air conditioned hours powering us along. We surprise the teacher, but she happily says, "There is always room for more!" and sets up a table for us. We revel not sweating our tooshes off in a marsh as we clumsily swipe color across our canvases.

Aggressively mediocre paintings in hand, we emerge into the evening air. It still holds the day's heat, but the sun's intensity is fading. We make pasta for dinner and decorate our car-home with our new art. We sleep soundly (once it is cool enough not to die in the car) knowing we are safe because any local art thieves would never come after our masterpieces.

Monday, Maligne and Evacuation

Today, unbeknownst to us, is our last day in Jasper. Thankfully, we planned to do all of the "must-do" activities in Jasper today, not tomorrow. Our plan focuses almost entirely around the Maligne Lake and River.

We begin the day by returning to Malign Canyon's sixth bridge, where we did our medicine walk. Today, we will be hiking all the way to the first bridge and back to see the narrow and dramatic unfold. We have been told that we should start at the sixth and last bridge for the best views, but after walking a mile to the fifth bridge, we have seen very little of the Maligne River or Canyon. You can definitely start at the fifth bridge if you want to. The trail gets busier the further we move up it, suddenly filled with pretty white sundresses. Definitely not something I would trust myself to hike in. Many people drive straight to the first and second bridges to get the most dramatic views without going far. Hannah and I are grateful, however, that we let ourselves enjoy the gradual increase in the height of the walls surrounding the river. In many places, water from Two Medicine Lake emerges from underground in a powerful rush. Higher up, the canyon becomes so narrow that rocks get wedged between the two walls, suspended high above the rushing river below. The hike down the canyon feels much faster than the hike up it, since we stopped at every viewpoint on the way up to ooh and ahh at the landscape. By the time we return to the sixth bridge, we are glad we started from the very beginning of the trail after all. It feels like we connected more with the canyon by seeing it from its inception. I would like to disclaim that it was hard to do justice to the canyon in a photo, so judge it by our impressions more than our pictures. A fellow hiker mentioned to us that he is also from Colorado, after seeing my CU shirt, and little did he know that would sign him up to take our picture on the bridge from the lookout across.

Our feet stink and ache after our hike, and we have some time to kill before we drive up the watershed to the glacially-fed Maligne Lake. The river's water is irresistible, so we pull out our camp chairs for yet another waterside reading session. This time, the cold water is so inviting that we put our chairs straight into the slow water of the river's edge and ice our feet. Neither Hannah nor I are big PB&J fans. We both believe that they taste only as good the place you eat them in is beautiful. Our lunch today is one of the best tasting PB&Js of my life.

Hannah dozes, and I drive up to Maligne Lake for our boat ride to Spirit Island. This is about as touristy as it gets in Jasper. But, Spirit Island is one of the most iconic views of the park, and the only other way to get to it is 12+ hours of paddling. No thanks. After weaving through what looks like an RV sales lot, we eventually find a coveted parking spot. It is a short walk through a tiny built out area with a restaurant, waffle shop, and boat dock. All of this was built by Pursuit, the company that seems to have a chokehold on nearly all of the mediocre attractions in the Northern Rockies. We board our boat and begin the 45 minute ride to Spirit Island, learning about the mountains and lake around us as we go. We learn the first white person to visit the lake was named Mary Schafer, and she did it with the help of local Indigenous guides. In a rare show of perspective by a colonizer, she chose to name all of the mountains around the lake after the Indigenous people that helped her on her journey, rather than after herself. The lake—and Spirit Island in particular—are special because the mountain range around the lake is U-shaped. This means that at the end of the lake, where Spirit Island sits, there is a curve of dramatic mountains and glaciers, called the Hall of Gods, framing it on three sides. Spirit Island is very sacred to the Stoney Nakoda people in part because they believe mountains are the physical representations of their ancestors and the mountains' arc around the island is unique. It is smokey, so we fear that our view of the island and the Hall of Gods behind it may be obscured, and though it is to a degree, we appreciate the depth the smoke lends to the landscape. Close mountains are clear, while the further back ones are impressive blue silhouettes. We get 15 minutes outside the boat to enjoy the island from the land it connects to (it isn't actually an island in the summer). Stepping foot on the sacred island is forbidden. On our journey back to the boat dock, Hannah and I are grateful for the tourism infrastructure that saved us a day of paddling. The view was definitely worth joining the masses.

As we drive back toward town, we see moose grazing just beside the road. We love animal jams and we have never seen a moose from so close before. It is still before 7:00 when we get to the town of Jasper, so we venture to redeem yesterday's cancelled beaver habitat hike. The trailhead is a bit outside town, and we pull into a parking lot where we are the only car. After we park, we sit in the car trying to hype ourselves up enough to go on another hike. It takes longer than we expected to get motivated, and as we sit in the car, it begins to rain. Sweet relief. Hannah and I have been hoping for rain to help tamp the fires down for days. Our relief quickly turns to dread, however, when the rain proves to be brief and accompanied by heavy winds. Ash is falling from the sky as we begin our hike.

We were hoping to actually see beavers on the hike, but we follow our paper map, with the path drawn over it, to a trail above the flooded territory. It provides a good vantage point of the wetland the local beavers worked hard to construct, but it is too distant to see any little residents. By the time we get above the beaver habitat, the smoke has thickened, the wind is stronger, and ash is falling more heavily. My fight or flight kicks in, and I begin to panic a little. My body is yelling to me: "We need to get out of here now!" At this point, we had only heard of the fires in Jasper as being "way over there, not a threat" but my instincts are on alert. Hannah doesn't question me as I get us back to the car as fast as possible. She is even brave enough to keep following the trail after getting surprised by a snake on it.

I breathe a little sigh of relief when we see the car again, but I still feel unsettled. As we drive back to our campsite, town feels different too. Clearly I am not the only one whose fight or flight has kicked in. The lines at all the gas stations in town are an hour long. When we get to the campsite, people are talking to the Parks Canada workers at the gate, and the line is moving absurdly slow. I want to wait in it to ask how we would get an evacuation notice, but eventually I convince myself I am being crazy and we should just go shower (we can bypass the line because we are already checked in). We pull into the bathroom parking lot for desperately needed showers, and when we get back to the car at 9:55 PM, we decide the prospect of cooking dinner is just too much. Instead, we sit in the shower parking lot ready to eat bars for dinner. That really worked out for us because five minutes later we get a GO NOW evacuation alert. I cannot tell you how fortunate we were because, had we been cooking dinner or had our car bed been set up, we probably would have gotten stuck behind hours of traffic. We see people around our campsite scrambling to take down tents and get RVs ready for travel. Hannah and I are already in the driver and passenger seats with our whole campsite in our car (except for two hammock straps and a carabiner...our laundry line), parked right next to the campsite entrance. Even still, there is already a line of cars for a mile before the turn into the evacuation route.

In shock, we drive. We don't know where we are going or how much of our plans we are leaving behind. Hannah is in her element in the driver's seat as I do my typical role navigating, looking at every town along the route and trying to determine where on Earth the mandatory route will land us. We get one more emergency alert that the evacuation needs to be complete within five hours, when the fire is expected to reach town. We lose service and have no access to more information as we drive further from the only part of Canada we know. Thankfully, we aren't alone. We have a long line of evacuees to follow. We finally stop at a gas station that stayed open after hours to service the flood of people from Jasper. We are clearly at the front of the tidal wave, finding a pump at one of the three gas stations without waiting in a line. We continue down the road, thinking we will keep driving. After passing a Best Western and continuing on, Hannah pauses and says, "I think we should sleep in that parking lot." We've been driving for two hours; it's after midnight; and we have no idea when we will find another. Hannah turns the car around, and we pull up to the Best Western, hoping they will let us sleep in their parking lot. When we go inside to ask, they already have a sign up saying they have no rooms left to house evacuees. The front desk person is clearly relieved when we ask for a parking spot, not a room, because she gets to share some good news. I think she has turned away a lot of people already tonight. We are grateful and relieved as we settle in for the night, safety away from the flames and evacuation traffic. We are so lucky. Tomorrow, we realize the next parking lot is about three hours further down the road. Good thing we stopped when we did.

JASPER

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