30.07.2013Loooong Road Trip to Jasper National Park

The next few days we spent on the road heading towards Jasper National Park. We followed the Alaskan Highway back to its mile zero again passing by Whitehorse,

dozens of lakes

and many more sceneries we just couldn’t pass by without taking a picture.

On the evenings we camped on campsites along the way and made the interesting experience, that a place breathtakingly beautiful at dusk

can loose some of its magic the next morning…

We saw our first porcupine hiding away in the woods.

And the route once again led us by Sign Post at Watson Lake.

Continuing on route, we passed by a peaceful heard of bisons grazing at the side of the highway.

We passed by Muncho Lake, which means big lake in the Kaska language. And in fact Muncho is one of the biggest natural lakes of the Canadian Rockies.

We saw some well camouflaged mountain goats

and less well camouflaged heading for a drink in the lake…

On our way up Summit Pass we again stopped at Summit Lake of Stone Mountain Provincial Park.

This time the weather was perfect and we did a hike up the Summit Peak.

From the top we had a grandiose view of the valley which is the highest point of the Alaska Highway.

And all of you following us for a while, know that we can not resist a cool brook on a warm day 🙂

Those cooled feet even attracted a pair of butterflies on that hot day.

And of course we did get more wet than just our feet 😉

Cooling in the water from the head to the tip of the toe…

With the weather at it’s nicest, we dried within minutes.

And continued our way down and back to the car.

Our route continued past Fort Nelson and towards Fort Saint John. On the way we passed by Helmut’s Oilfield and checked it is still running at full capacity 😉

That evening we had a pretty scary experience when we got surprised by the worst thunderstorm and showers we ever encountered! We had booked our motel in Fort Saint John as we were expecting rain that night. But we never expected to get caught in total darkness with rain poring from buckets and pondering against our windshield. Despite using the high beam lights of the car it was nearly impossible to see the shoulders of the street as there were no reflectors or other markers on them.
After struggling for over an hour
with hardly any other cars headed our direction we eventually managed to get to a rest area. There we had the night-saving idea to wait for one of those Canadian lumber trucks. Since they drive during nights regularly they are equipped with huge head lights managing to illuminate these pot hole dark black roads. As one of them passed by we quickly followed the trucks backlights using it as our private pilot car. This finally got us to our motel in Fort Saint John at 1am in the night. That night we both just sank into bed, happy to have managed this rugged drive and promising ourselves to never drive under these conditions again.

The next day the sun came out and nothing indicated the frightening weather and road conditions of the past night.

We passed by Dawson Creek were the Alaska Highway starts.

The remaining road to Jasper National Park led through the “Grande Prairie” which is almost entirely flat and our drive just went on for hours

and hours

and hours.

But the weather was great and having had enough adrenaline released the previous night we enjoyed the monotonous and comfortable road conditions for a change 🙂