Life in the Slow Lane - Jasper Day 2
Posted 08-17-2014 at 08:49 PM by silverlabs
Tags on the road, pet forum
This day we spent exploring Jasper National Park. We had a knew outlook on the road construction between Jasper and Valemount.
We don't have satellite so we have been at the mercy of cable or antennae offerings. It hasn't been bad and we landed on a show called Highway thru Hell. It is about big rig wrecker drivers who work along a certain highway in Canada.
Anywho, in one of the episodes they show the road construction crews working. They have two guys hanging on ropes off the side of a cliff. Traffic is stopped by another crew member. The cliffhangers use a crowbar to pry rocks loose and send them plummeting to the road below. A front loader then scoops up the rocks and disposes of them. There is a law that only allows traffic to be stopped for 20 minutes so they must work quickly. There were several crews doing this between Jasper and Valemount. Fascinating. Just fascinating!
Jasper is a bustling township. We found a parking spot easily and wandered around town. Found a nice little cafe with great sandwiches. Outside tables made it easy to eat with the dogs.
There is a pretty grassy area near the town center. Next to it was an information center for the parks. I had read about a dog friendly hike to a tea house and convinced the hubs we should do that . I went inside to ask where it was and met a really friendly park ranger. She explained that the tea house is actually in Banff. Bummer!
I asked where a dog friendly trail might be because I had also read that the national parks are not exceptionally dog friendly. She diasagreed and cheerfully marked several places on the map she gave me. She suggested we take one that was particularly scenic and close to town.
By this time the farmers market was open. We picked up some fresh fruit and organic beef. We missed the Saskatoon pie, though.
Our hike did not disappoint. It was about a mile downhill, which meant a mile uphill on the return trip. We followed a rushing creek with many drop offs and a few waterfalls. It was so incredibly beautiful! We just couldn't believe how lucky we were to get to see it.
On the way out of town we drove through several of the campgrounds to see if our rig could fit in there on future trips . There were a couple of AS and many SOB so we decided we could make it. Only one campground has full hookups. We can camp with or without and decided we would definitely put Jasper on our return list.
We returned to Valemount to discover that the breakers were not repaired. The hubs read the forums a bit to research the problem. He was trying to figure out if it was us or the campground. He concluded that the campground was not using the correct type of breaker. The weather was cool so we were able to keep everything going by not using the a/c or heater.
The same tv show was on that night. We started paying a bit more attention to it when we heard them mention the town of Kamloops. That was our next destination. I got out the atlas and looked up the highway and compared that with our directions. Yep. The Road to Kamloops is the highway thru hell. And yep, that's exactly where we are headed....pulling a trailer. This should be interesting....
We don't have satellite so we have been at the mercy of cable or antennae offerings. It hasn't been bad and we landed on a show called Highway thru Hell. It is about big rig wrecker drivers who work along a certain highway in Canada.
Anywho, in one of the episodes they show the road construction crews working. They have two guys hanging on ropes off the side of a cliff. Traffic is stopped by another crew member. The cliffhangers use a crowbar to pry rocks loose and send them plummeting to the road below. A front loader then scoops up the rocks and disposes of them. There is a law that only allows traffic to be stopped for 20 minutes so they must work quickly. There were several crews doing this between Jasper and Valemount. Fascinating. Just fascinating!
Jasper is a bustling township. We found a parking spot easily and wandered around town. Found a nice little cafe with great sandwiches. Outside tables made it easy to eat with the dogs.
There is a pretty grassy area near the town center. Next to it was an information center for the parks. I had read about a dog friendly hike to a tea house and convinced the hubs we should do that . I went inside to ask where it was and met a really friendly park ranger. She explained that the tea house is actually in Banff. Bummer!
I asked where a dog friendly trail might be because I had also read that the national parks are not exceptionally dog friendly. She diasagreed and cheerfully marked several places on the map she gave me. She suggested we take one that was particularly scenic and close to town.
By this time the farmers market was open. We picked up some fresh fruit and organic beef. We missed the Saskatoon pie, though.
Our hike did not disappoint. It was about a mile downhill, which meant a mile uphill on the return trip. We followed a rushing creek with many drop offs and a few waterfalls. It was so incredibly beautiful! We just couldn't believe how lucky we were to get to see it.
On the way out of town we drove through several of the campgrounds to see if our rig could fit in there on future trips . There were a couple of AS and many SOB so we decided we could make it. Only one campground has full hookups. We can camp with or without and decided we would definitely put Jasper on our return list.
We returned to Valemount to discover that the breakers were not repaired. The hubs read the forums a bit to research the problem. He was trying to figure out if it was us or the campground. He concluded that the campground was not using the correct type of breaker. The weather was cool so we were able to keep everything going by not using the a/c or heater.
The same tv show was on that night. We started paying a bit more attention to it when we heard them mention the town of Kamloops. That was our next destination. I got out the atlas and looked up the highway and compared that with our directions. Yep. The Road to Kamloops is the highway thru hell. And yep, that's exactly where we are headed....pulling a trailer. This should be interesting....
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