Masters of RVing Adventures

I need to do a little catching up. It’s been a few hectic days with wildfires in the Canadian Rockies. We arrived mid-afternoon on Saturday, July 20th, after a harrowing exit from the David Thompson Resort. If you don’t remember the interesting account of our previous campsite, refer back to the July 16th post. While the site was plenty large enough for Jackson & Cheeto, exiting the long row of sites and turning onto the lane leading out of the resort wasn’t quite wide enough for Jackson to make the turn smoothly. With the help of a few of our group members watching the left back, right back, and me watching the right front and Mark’s expert driving ability, we managed to just squeeze Jackson between three trees, two stumps and way too many low-hanging branches!

Then on to the three-hour drive to our current camp spot, Jasper-Hinton KOA. We are on the edge of Jasper National Park and have been fighting smoke and hazy conditions for five days now. Last night they closed the gates to Jasper National Park closest to us and we’ve been on an evacuation alert all day. We pull out tomorrow for our next stop. Thought I’d share our sun this early evening.

**Quick note for dog owners staying at this KOA. They have a huge open field as part of their property. They call it a dog walk area, but we and a number of other dog owners are letting our doggies off leash to run and play.**

Saturday afternoon was spent doing laundry, cleaning out 2 inches (5 cm) of dust inside the rig from the last campground, and grocery shopping. [Nope, Jackson still hasn’t had a bath!]

Sunday was a full day spent back in Jasper National Park – fantastic views, regardless of the smokey conditions. We took Timber to the Athabasca Falls. We had an entire group of Asian tourists taking more pictures of Timber than the Falls! We then attempted to take him on the Jasper Sky Tram Gondola and into the Marmot Ski area. He’s not such a fan of Gondola’s, so we had to abort that outing; and the Marmot Basin was closed. While many ski areas have mountain biking and various other summer options, apparently not so for Marmot. We ended up letting Timber swim in a small glacier lake and gave him a big Timber snack. He was happy with his day out.

We then went back into the town of Jasper and did just a bit of souvenir shopping :)…

Maligne Lake

Yesterday we went to Maligne Lake for a “cruise” out into the back country to the sacred ‘Spirit’ island. Again, the smokey haze from the wildfires did not allow us to capture the true beauty of the place, but did allow for some great “spooky, spirit” shots! Big shout out to Hinton SPCA doggie day care! Timber had so much fun meeting new friends.

At 2:15 AM, we received an emergency alert that evacuations for the Maligne Lake area, Jasper town center, and all the campgrounds in the area were being conducted. We had just been to these sight-seeing areas hours earlier.

Wildlife Wonders

As promised in the title, we have a few wonders to share with you here at the end of this blog.