June 2 Jasper National Park. AB

Today promised to have good weather and we booked a boat tour on Malign Lake ( pronounced Maleen) as it is one of the ‘must dos’ when in Jasper.

Our tour was at 9:45 am. The boat dock is 44 km up one of the side roads decently close to our campground and takes about an hour. We left camp a little after 7 am at a very chilly 37 F. We thought we would have breakfast at the boat dock. Although the day was bright sunshine along the way, it was foggy over the lake and the tours were delayed by about half an hour.

It was so worth getting up early for. We had been looking forward to a wonderful photography day here in this park and it didn’t disappoint! Especially since we only had the one day here plus the afternoon before.

We finished our boat tour around 11:30 am and drove back down the road and stopped at Malign Canyon where we picked up a sandwich for lunch and the hiked around the canyon as far as the 4th bridge. The Malign River flows from the lake to the Athabasca River through a very deep and narrow canyon. The weather is absolutely perfect today. The following photos are just a few of the many, many I took here.

It was fairly hot, and so were we, by the time we finished hiking the canyon. We headed into the town of Jasper for icecream at Grandma’s Place. I had one of my favorite flavors that you can’t get in the U.S., Tigertail. Its somewhat like a rich orange sherbet with black licorice stripes. Yum.

Rather than heading back to our campsite for the evening, which was rather boring, we drove up to Pyramid Lake just west of Jasper. It had several small sand beaches with a spectacular view of Mount Pyramid. Aptly named. We pulled out our chairs, made sundowners and sat on a relatively private beach for about 3 hours. Sunset is after 10 pm so lots of time to sit and do nothing after a spectacular day. Since we have our worldly belongings with us at all times, we also enjoyed a cold dinner of leftover chicken, a salad and Pringles with fruit for dessert. Just as we were finishing dinner, I spotted a female elk a few hundred meters up the lake enjoying an evening stroll and water in the lake!

We didn’t get back to camp until 10 pm. Such a lovely day.