Valley of the Five Lakes trail...

Here are some photos from the hike I did with two Australian friends over the weekend (the same hike as the videos posted below):

hiking the Valley of the Five Lakes...

Here's some video of a hike I went on yesterday, with two Australian friends who live on my floor (or I should say lived, in the past tense, because I'll no longer live there myself in a couple of hours. I'm headed out of Jasper this afternoon, driving west into B.C. and in the general direction of Vancouver...):

a frozen lake...

a meadow and a creek....

Hiking into a meadow with a creek running through it on the way back from the Valley of the Five Lakes:

driving through Jasper...

Here we are driving through the town of Jasper after hiking. Near the end of the video you can't quite hear what I'm saying because the window is open, but I'm mentioning that one of the hotels we're driving past, the Amethyst Lodge, is one of the four hotels that I worked for as gardener/groundskeeper up here:

Wabasso Lake, Athabasca Falls, Pyramid Mt. and Medicine Lake

Here are a few more photos from some hikes I did over the weekend; these first two are at Wabasso Lake:




Katina and Theresa at Athabasca Falls:



Pyramid Mountain:



Canada Geese in Medicine Lake:

Beaver Lake, Summit Lake and Medicine Lake

Attack of the curious sheep, near Medicine Lake:



Beaver Lake beginning to freeze over:



Summit Lake:



Beaver Lake at a different point, where it's not yet frozen over:



Medicine Lake, later in the same day from the photo above, with evening light:

Medicine Lake, Jasper

I finally made use of the video capability on my digital camera, and shot some short videos of Jasper over the weekend, when I went hiking both Saturday and Sunday. In case you're unable to play them, you can download quicktime by clicking on the subject line above, which is a link to the apple website. Hopefully that will do the trick...Anyway this first one is of Medicine Lake, about 15 miles from the town of Jasper, and where I've been several times:

Canada geese on Medicine Lake

Bighorn sheep

This one is pretty hilarious. I was driving up the road alongside Medicine Lake, and came across a herd (or whatever you would call it) of bighorn sheep. This is almost the same spot that I saw some a couple of weeks ago, so I guess they like to hang out there for some reason. Well I stopped to take some more pictures and, as you'll see, they sort of surrounded me:

Summit Lake

Beaver Lake

Wabasso Lake, Jasper

Here's a video I shot today with my digital camera (update: this is taken the day before the other videos were taken, in a different part of Jasper park). I went on a hike with a couple other fellow employees to Lake Wabasso, about ten miles outside of Jasper, then it was an hour hike up to the lake. In case you can't hear the audio, notice that the lake is just starting to freeze over:



Just after leaving the lake, we ended up seeing a moose, though we didn't get close enough to get any particularly good pictures.

some old photos of Banff and Jasper...

Here are a bunch of photos I took on my way up to Jasper back in August. I was unable to post them at the time, because I wasn't able to send picture messages from my phone once I got to Jasper, so they've been stuck on my phone this whole time. But I just decided to give it another try, and they went through this time...

The town of Banff in Banff National Park, which is directly south of Jasper National Park:



Bow Lake in Banff Nat'l Park, where I did a hike:



A glacier on the Icefields Parkway, which is the road connecting Banff and Jasper parks (they share a border, and both are also right up against the Alberta/B.C. border, but are wholly in Alberta. There are other national parks that are right over the border in B.C.):



One of the massive vehicles they use to give tours on the glaciers:



Some poor suckers stuck hitchhiking....Actually I would have picked them up myself, if my car wasn't so crammed with my stuff already:

Columbia Icefield/Edith Cavell hike

Global warming, schmobal shmarming! (the sign reads, "The glacier was here in 1982"):



The Athabasca Glacier is behind me, which is part of the Columbia Icefield. Apparently it is actually the headwaters for the Columbia River that separates Oregon and Washington:




A few weeks later, some wildlife on a hike up to the Edith Cavell glacier here in Jasper:

Edith Cavell glacier...

Edith Cavell glacier, only about a half hour's drive from the town of Jasper and then a short hike:





A lake near the road on the way up to the trailhead for the Edith Cavell hike:

some more Jasper photos...

Canadian geese (I wonder if they call them that in Canada? not sure) with a ridge of recently-snow-covered mountains in the background. Jasper is pretty much surrounded by mountains that look like this:




The train tracks that run through town. Fortunately the train doesn't seem to make much noise, since it's pretty close by:



Either a coyote or a wolf (most likely a coyote, but it does look pretty wolf-like) that I saw on the way out to the dump with a load of yard debris:



In front of the Chateau Jasper while working, one of the resorts that I work around as gardener/groundskeeper. Also employee housing, where I live, is in the back of this hotel:



Update: a friend says they're actually called Canada Geese; and that she thinks the blurry photo is of a coyote, not a wolf. That does seem more likely since coyotes are more likely to hang out in the vicinity of humans than wolves.

photos of Medicine Lake, Jasper...

Here are some more photos I took on a day off, last Saturday, at Medicine Lake here in Jasper. It's about a 30 minute drive from the town of Jasper, and I've been up there several times. As you'll see it's looking pretty dramatic with the fall colors against the gray backdrop of the mountains; plus I lucked out and came upon a herd of curious bighorn sheep alongside the road:

more photos...