While we didn’t have to check out of Clearwater until 11, the power company was turning off the Electricity from Kamloops all the way to Valemont (which is a couple of hundred kilometers) at 7:30am so there wasn’t a lot of point staying at the motel.
We were on the road by 8:30 and headed to Jasper which is just under 400km. The drive was stunning again you drive past lots of little lakes and rivers. You can imagine that there are bears, Moose and Elk just behind the treeline out of sight as you drive past.
We hadn’t had any breakfast (power was out) before we hit the road so we were very happy to find a little roadhouse/servo that had a generator going and had coffee and pastries. I had an apple fritter while Stu had a cinnamon scroll. Once we had something to eat we were off again. We ended up driving the whole way to Jasper pretty much without stopping other than to get fuel at Valemont.
Jasper was devastated by a wildfire last year and half the town was destroyed. People are still living in demountable buildings as they rebuild the town. Everything looks very new, although I don’t think these are rebuilt buildings, just well kept. It is very sad to see how much of the forest they lost last year. We booked a wildlife tour for tomorrow afternoon which should be fun, they said they had seen Elk and Moose recently but that the bears had moved higher up into the alpine regions as it has gotten colder.
After a walk around town and a bite to eat for a late lunch, we headed out to where we are staying. Just out of town there were a whole lot of cars stopped by the side of the road and there was a small group of Elk a bull, a cow and two little calves, one of which was hiding behind a tree and difficult to spot.
We are staying in these lovely little log cabins by the river at a place called Becker’s Chalets. It comes highly recommended in Lonely Planet. We have rented a two bedroom one bathroom cabin. It is quaint but compact. I booked a riverside cabin and we have a lovely view of the river from our kitchen and bedroom window. It was also impacted by the fires and has little to no wifi and very poor mobile reception and they lost a number of cabins and the laundry block. They are in the process of rebuilding everything at the moment. It started to rain just as we checked in, so Stu and I decided to head into town to a coin laundry we had seen to do our washing. This laundry is attached to a café so Stu tried the cinnamon maple latte while I had a standard flat white. The coffee was actually good – we have struggled to find a good espresso based coffee since we arrived in Canada so this might be my first decent coffee in a while.
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