another canadian adventure - jasper national park: day 1

You may recall in 2017 Joe and I travelled to Banff National Park and a very small section of Yoho in the Canadian Rockies.  Banff, Yoho and Jasper are all reasonably close together.  One could spend weeks and even months there and still feel like exploration would never end.  Only a short time after coming home from Banff, Joe said, "I want to go back, I feel like we barely scratched the surface".  I agreed.  It made it quite easy to decide where we wanted to go for 2018.  That is how Jasper National Park unfolded.

Jasper was a bit of an adventure to get to.  Joe and I seem to like to travel to 'complicated' places, but it's always worth it!

3am wakeup call for our 6 am flight

2 hour flight to Toronto, Canada

2 hour layover (no direct flights)

4 hour flight to Edmonton, Canada

Pickup rental car

3.5+ hour drive to Jasper

Made for a VERRRRY long day... 

Note: As always our travel journey is a mix of cellphone photos and my DSLR.  With travel photos, I do edit minimally as we tend to make way too many photos.  With the combination of cameras we capped at 1021 photos.  Now you may understand why it takes me so long to blog about our adventures!  AND well it's technically busy season for me.

We didn't make many photos on day 1, as you probably noticed our travel to get to Jasper was quite the haul.  But our first stop inside the park was a beautiful overlook of mountains and the Athabasca River.  The water gets me every single time...  so beautiful.

Roche Ronde, Roche De Smet and Pyramid

As we continued our drive on the Yellowhead Highway, there was a 'traffic jam'.  Elk were grazing on the side of the road: two males, some females and few young ones.  One of the males was absolutely huge.  As I don't own a zoom lens I had to wait until they moved closer or take what I could get of the elk as they walked by.  (please kick me if I don't purchase one before our next adventure as I complain every time about not having zoom lens and having to bring a few primes and swap them out quickly to make photos... it can be frustrating... first world problem - yes yes.) The largest of the two males started walking fairly close to our car and was able to capture some pretty incredible photos of him.

Smaller of the two male elk

a few of the females and young

At one point the large male made eye contact and some sort of elk call.  That was when I told Joe, "I think it's time to go".

larger of the two male elk

Love the tongue! 

Required photo by the entrance to Jasper

NOTE: I will NEVER hear the end of the time we didn't stop at the Napa Valley sign in 2008.  That was 10 years ago and by golly if we ever go back to Napa we are going to take 20 pictures by that sign so I don't have to hear about it ever again.

We arrived at Patricia Lake Bungalows quite late in the afternoon.  We made a  quick walk to the dock of Patricia Lake (literally in our backyard) just to check it out (and touch the water of course) before unpacking and heading to the grocery store.  

PS - I would HIGHLY recommend staying at the Patricia Lake Bungalows.  We stayed in The Grove suite.