We decided to backtrack to the town of Hinton, near Jasper National Park, in order to take the more scenic route north to the start of the Alaska Highway in Dawson Creek. On the way from Edmonton, we stopped in Edson for lunch and ended out spending a bunch of time in their excellent visitor center stocking up on tourist information for the next leg of our trip. The visitor center had a working model train, which kept Quinn entertained for a long time, which in turn explains our extended stay there.

On the recommendation of the lady working at the visitor center, we stopped in Hinton to explore their beaver walkways. We were somewhat skeptical, but it turned out to be a great experience. It’s a series of boardwalks installed (by volunteers) over a wetland area. It’s near a series of beaver dams and a large beaver lodge.

We walked around the area for about an hour, and on the way out crossed a small bridge where a beaver was eating about five feet from where we were standing. We sat and watched him eat for about 10 minutes – he (or she, we’re not sure) started with the leaves, then proceeded to eat the green bark off a stick just like an ear of corn. You’ll have to watch the video to appreciate it.

Is it cute, or just a giant swimming rat?

We needed to make a stop at Walmart, but it was closed by the time the beaver finished its dinner, so we took the opportunity to spend our first night camped in a Walmart parking lot. For those of you who are not RVers, Walmart allows you to camp for free in the parking lots of all of their stores. On this particular night there were probably 15 RVs there.

After doing our shopping the next morning we headed north on Alberta Highway 40 to the town of Grande Cache. It’s so named because fur trappers erected a large cache in the area to store furs until they could be transported by canoe back to the east coast.

First we saw the bright yellow two dimensional caribou…

… Then we saw the real thing.

After booking a rafting trip on the Smokey River for the next day, we headed to, yes, you guessed it, the local swimming pool. For a small town it’s an amazing facility. We figure these rec centers are so nice because they’re the only way the locals survive the winters up here. It started raining as we arrived, so it was a good way to spend the afternoon.

The next morning we went for a short hike to the confluence of the Smoky and Sulfur rivers. After lunch we met our rafting trip. Because of Quinn’s tender age, we were limited to a class I/II trip, which is pretty much a float trip. Our guide was great, and the scenery was nice. Quinn had a great time bouncing up and down in the small wave trains.

It started raining again just as we finished dinner, so we’re holed up in the van, but at least the campground has wifi to keep us entertained, and to keep the blog posts coming!

Tomorrow we plan to continue north to Grand Prairie and the start of the Alaska Highway!

We’d decided to drive the 350 km to Edmonton primarily to visit the train museum there. It seems that the North American leg of our trip has somehow achieved a focus around water parks, pools and train museums. Quinn was so excited he bounced up and down in his seat almost the whole way!

The first order of business when we arrived in the metro area was finding a place to camp. We drove into a provincial park (like our state parks) and found out that the sites there were booked through the long weekend. So we pulled out our Alberta camping guide and started calling around in search of a place with an opening. Thank goodness we’d paid to get a Canada plan added to our AT&T service!

After calling 3 more campgrounds we found a place that could accommodate us. It was a commercial campground on the western side of Edmonton in a town called Stony Plain. Our experiences with commercial campgrounds so far haven’t been the best (picture RVs stacked up as far as the eye can see), and our expectations were even lower since we’d figured it was likely that all the goods campsites were probably taken.

When we pulled up to the campground it looked full to capacity and we’d feared that they’d planned to put us in the crowded lot across the street. It turns out that they were indeed full, but that they had set aside a spot for us inside the campground after all.

The site was very basic. It was on dirt, without trees or even a picnic table, but they gave us a 50% discount from the usual fees and we were truly just happy to have a decent place to stay.

Ultimately we were surprised to find that we really liked staying there. We were right next to the main building, so we had fantastic access to the washrooms and laundry facilities (both of which were clean and in pristine condition). The other benefit was that there was a blue-grass music festival across the street and it appeared as though the vast majority of the people staying in the campground spent all of their time over there so we pretty much had the campground to ourselves! Plus the Internet wifi actually worked so we got caught up on email and web updates fairly quickly.

The next morning we drove into Edmonton in search of the Alberta Railway Museum. It took us awhile to find it as the mapping software that we used took us to the wrong place at first (it was Apple Maps — we won’t make that mistake again!). Ultimately it was on the northeastern side of the city and quite a distance from the city limits too!

The museum didn’t look like much at first. They did have the steam engine running for the holiday weekend and that was our main draw. It was Engine 1392 which is celebrating its 100th birthday this year. We bought tickets, and since we had awhile to wait for the next train departure, we opted to take the walking tour of the grounds.

Train 1392 is 100 years old this year

We’re so glad that we did! There was an amazing array of engines, mail cars, kitchen cars, passenger cars, and cabooses to wander through along with a very nice array of placards describing the history of each car. They even had displays depicting the development of the diesel-electric engine and the overall Canadian railroad history. It was fantastic!

Engineer Quinn

The steam train ride was fun too! Quinn couldn’t stop smiling the entire time. We also found out that apparently there was some famous hockey player visiting the museum that day with his family. We don’t have any idea who it was (we’re fairly clueless on that subject), but we do know that it wasn’t Wayne Gretsky. 🙂

On our way back across town, we stopped at a large splash park with a sizable playground adjacent to it. It had been fairly cool out most of the day but it warmed up considerably in the afternoon so it seemed like a good way for Quinn to get his wiggles out.

There was no wifi at the park but Jen still managed to get our update for Jasper typed out while Witt took on the project of adding some more structural support to one of our cabinets in preparation for the bumpy roads that our undoubtedly in our future. It’s kind of wierd to break out of your tools and start wood-working in a public park, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

Splash Park!

Screen time

Van-turned-woodshop

As it was still the holiday weekend, we opted to return to the same campground (CampNClass) that we’d stayed the previous night. Although by then it was nearly time to close the front office we found out that the manager had already booked our spot for us — even though we hadn’t even paid yet! What great customer service!

While Jen set up our camp, Witt & Quinn went to check out the blue-grass festival but quickly turned around when they found out that it would cost $55 per person to gain admittance. Since we could hear the music fine from our campground (without it being too loud) it seemed wise to enjoy the show from the comfort of our van.

Now we are on the road again. This time we are driving north and west toward the start of the Alaska Highway in Dawson Creek, British Columbia, by way of Grand Prairie, Alberta, and some more scenic highways along the way!

The landscape here is just overwhelmingly beautiful. After spending most of the previous day driving through amazing, jaw-dropping scenery we couldn’t believe that it was possible for the scenery to get any better. However, the vistas at the Columbia Ice Sheet abundantly exceeded our expectations.

From the visitor center the view encompasses 5 large glaciers nestled in between peaks of the tallest mountains in the Canadian Rockies. The higher latitude here means that tree line is lower on these peaks than in the Colorado Rockies, so even though these peaks are a little bit closer to sea-level than some in Colorado, the effect is marvelous – towering, rugged peaks that preside over the Columbia Ice Field and the impossibly-blue lakes below. One of these peaks, Snow Dome, marks the tri-divide — the glaciers from Snow Dome fall into the Atlantic, Pacific or Arctic Oceans depending on which side of the mountain the snow melt trickles down.

Quinn boarding the ice bus

We booked a ride on a bus tour onto the Columbia Ice Sheet. Of course, these were no ordinary buses! The buses are specially made for ice travel and all the ones like it ever made are in operation here – that is, except for one which is used for transporting employees around McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica (maybe Bjorn could tell us some fun bus stories from one of his tours down there. Is it really dubbed “Ivan the Terri-Bus”?).

On the glacier

We got to fill our water bottles up from the glacier melt. This resulted in very cold hands.

Our 6×6 bus with the enormous tires got us up and down 18-degree-sloped roads handily. Our driver/guide joked that the bus tires are the most-photographed items on the tour — and he might be right; despite the glorious scenery all around us, those tires did get our attention!

Since we’d arrived there early in the day we had the benefit of only having to share the ice with 8 other people (there can be up to 300 people on the ice during busy times) so we got to explore the area at a relaxed pace. We filled up our water bottles with glacier water just to top off the experience!

Later that day we headed into the town of Jasper to visit the rec center pool (so Q could get some pool time and we could get some showers). While we were there we also grabbed some dinner at a brew pub — where we had the privilege of paying $7.50 each for our pints of microbrew beer!

Afterward dinner we investigated the Jasper train station (where the Trans-Canadian passenger train passes stops as well as numerous freight trains). We also admired the fantastic steam engine that’s parked there. We easily spent 45 minutes just looking at that steam engine. Quinn was in train nirvana.

It was getting late by the time we drove into our campsite, so perhaps we shouldn’t have been too surprised to find that it was already occupied. The momma elk and fawn seemed really comfortable there though, so we just waited until they finally decided on their own to get up and move on.

The elk family was occupying our campsite when we arrived. They didn’t pay the entry fee, but we don’t think they used the showers, so it’s all good.

We slept in the next morning and Witt and Quinn made blueberry pancakes for breakfast. It was a nice departure from our usual granola or oatmeal. We also got to know our campsite neighbors who were on holiday from Saskatchewan and gave us the scoop on the upcoming Canadian Heritage Day Weekend (it’s basically their Memorial Day weekend). In a nutshell, that meant to us that finding campsites was about to get a lot more challenging for us over the next few days.

We found out from the park ranger that everything that could be booked in advance is already booked through the weekend. Our only option was an overflow lot at a nearby campsite. So we went there and paid for a spot. Since the overflow lot was basically an open field we had to mark the spot we wanted with rope and some chairs while we left for some sightseeing.

We drove the windy and scenic road toward Maligne Lake with the additional goals of looking for wildlife and finding a picnic table with a view where we could enjoy some dinner. All of our objectives were achieved — the lake was gorgeous (of course), we saw several big horn ewes and lambs, and the view for our delicious dinner was incredible. This bolstered our spirits in preparation for the return to the chaos of the overflow campsite. The campsite wasn’t horrible, but it was crowded and we were really glad that we weren’t planning to stay there more than one night.

Maligne Lake

In the morning we headed toward the Miette Hot Springs for a dip in the therapeutic waters. We arrived there early so we avoided the crowds and had a fantastic time. We also took in a short hike to the source of the springs. There we also saw the remains of the structure that was used to house the hot springs for public access until 1984 (when they decided to build the new facility).

Not wanting to deal with holiday weekend crowds anymore, nor stay in the same overflow lot again, we decided to leave the park. As we drove out the eastern exit of Jasper NP we passed a long line of campers and cars waiting to enter. We think the line was about 3 miles long! It seems like it’s a good time to head to Edmonton.

More photos from Banff, Jasper, and a sneak preview of Edmonton…

Rainy days are hard. It rained on and off all day and was generally pretty cold. We killed a couple of hours at the Banff public library writing website updates, went to the local museum, and even took in Monsters University, which we think was Q’s first feature length movie.

After the matinee, we found a campground just outside of town. It was still cold and rainy, so we heated up some leftovers in the van. We even slept with the heater on for the first time.

The next day, after a stop in town for groceries, we continued north on the trans-Canada highway to Lake Louise. We arrived at about 2 pm, and after circling around the parking lot for awhile, we finally found a spot. We went for a 2km hike to an overlook and were very impressed that Quinn did the whole thing without complaint!

Hiker Quinn

Arriving back at the lake, we got on a guided canoe trip. It was a good experience – our animated and fun gude, Bruce, was also well versed in local history and told stories and even sang songs about the fur traders who plied the rivers between Montreal and the outer territories by canoe back in the day.

Canoe tour of Lake Louise

By the time we were done it was late, so we headed north until we found a campground. Even though we got almost the last spot, it was right on the creek. The kiddo had a great time making dams, diversions, and waterfalls.

The next day we went back to Lake Louise, this time heading up to Moraine Lake. We got there by 10am, and already the parking was backed up along the road leading in. By the time we left a couple of hours later they had traffic stopped at the entrance. Sightseeing at these spots is as crowded with people as you’d expect for peak tourist season, although the scenery is so spectacular that you can understand why people come from far and wide to see it.

Moraine Lake

Headed north once again, we were stopped at one of the many crazy-photoshopped-blue-lake-in-the-foreground-and-glacier-in-the-background overlooks when we decided on a whim to give a ride to a couple of German backpackers. They looked to be under twenty and rode with us for a couple of hours to the Columbia ice field, the next stop on our trek.

Checking out the scenery

We departed Crowsnest pass in mid-afternoon, after an obligatory stop at the local swimming pool. We drove about 40km up the Kananaskis Highway and found a provincial campground to spend the night at. The road is good with some corrugations and passes through very beautiful countryside.

Along the Kananaskis Highway

Cattle guards are “Texas Gates.” There’s not much culturally different between the US and this part of Canada, so I have to point out the little things. No offence to any Canadians reading this.

The next morning we again headed north – the map shows a couple of routes that meet up with major highways west of Calgary. After an hour of driving, we came to an intersection. Unfortunately, both of the roads leading onward were closed. We drove back down the road to where we had seen some people fishing. They told us that both roads were closed due to the recent flooding in the area.

We headed south the way we came for about an hour until we found a road leading out to highway 22, the main route to Calgary. On the route north we could see the devestation caused by the flooding. We arrived in Calgary at around four pm. After a couple of tries at commercial RV parks just outside the city, we eventually found a provincial campground about half way between Calgary and Canmore. Like many of the campgrounds, it had a playground and so was a big hit with Quinn.

The next morning when we woke up it was cold and overcast. The grey skies kept us in bed, and it was almost 11:30 by the time we were packed up and headed out. Driving up the valley into the Rockies along Alberta Highway 1 is stunning, with granite peaks towering over the lush green valley. We spent the afternoon in Canmore at their excellent new public recreation center and pool.

Yes, it really is that cold.

Sometimes I think we’re doing the swimming pool tour of North America

We drove to Banff to find a camp site for the night. It’s still cold and a little rainy, which has dissuaded us from taking Quinn on his first whitewater rafting trip. Instead of cooking breakfast we drove into town for an excellent breakfast.