Unfortunately, due to the weak wifi signals everywhere I’ve been recently, my phone won’t publish posts. That means that I have to go onto a computer to write my blog, which I have been extremely reluctant to do as is evident by the lack of new posts for quite some time because it means I can’t publish the pictures stored on my phone alongside, but I figured words alone are better than nothing. I will try to evoke images for you but I can’t promise anything.
For the past five days, I have been in Jasper. Surprisingly for such an attractive location, and despite the town’s best efforts in setting up souvenir shops down the entire length of the main street, there are very few tourists here. Or at least, you don’t see many. The trails are always completely empty and peaceful, save the odd hardcore cyclist passing by silently. There are dozens of RVs everywhere though – rumbling down the highways, parked in all their monstrous masculinity along the sides of the main street of the town close to the innumerable camping grounds and ‘lodges’. That’s a vehicle that a guy buys to say ‘Look how I provide for my family. They want go camping, I drive to middle of nowhere in big house-truck and we sleep and go toilet on-board. Maybe we eat bear that I kill. Or maybe drive-thru. UGGGGG!’
I find them very tedious. Apart from the way they don’t stop for pedestrians at crossings (‘Man truck no stop for puny people, rolls past puny people like molten thunder ugggg’) they actually obscure the light if you walk on the wrong side of the road, and they make the most tremendous noise that can be heard from the lower trails. This was incentive enough for me to go on a long hike on the first day. I took the furthest trail route from the town up to Pyramid Lake, a vast, glassy blue valley floor bordered alternately by walls of enormous grey mountains and forests of pine trees that creep right up to the water’s edge and bend forward to peer into it, as if staring perpetually at their own reflection. For twenty minutes everything was beautiful and warm, and I sat and wondered how they take the cheery pictures that go on postcards when in reality the view is so blindingly sunlit that everything looks dark through a camera lens, then gradually the sun faded and there came muffled booms! of thunder resounding ominously in the next valley, and I looked up to see rolls of thick white cloud galloping over the mountain ridges towards me. The mountainside grew hazy with rain. I knew it was time to go.
When I finally got back to the hostel I was exhausted. The hike was 14km in total, and the walk each way between the townsite and the hostel was 6km – a day’s total of 26km. I had tried to save the money from the $5 bus fare and hadn’t realised how damned far it would be. The next day promised more rain, so I thanked the skies and feeble sun and instead of forcing myself on another hike I went to the cinema and saw Ice Age 3. It was brilliant.
The hostel itself seems to accommodate a huge number of people, but maybe that’s because there are only two dorms of 30 and 40 beds each, and its remoteness from the town means everyone gets here at about 7pm and stays here for the evening – no popping into town for dinner. Also, it seems to have a very high guest turnover with people staying only one night to break their journey, and lots of groups rather than lone travellers (because what kind of fool would decide to go hiking alone in the Rockies? I ask you…) and therefore a lot of noise. The noise peaks in the dorm, naturally, just when tired hikers are trying to go to sleep, (like today when a gang of excitable German girls arrived and giggled madly as they tried to make their beds up) and again in the morning around 7 o’clock (when the school group from Korea set their alarms and began their interminable rustling of plastic bags, packing and repacking individual items).
I leave for Vancouver tomorrow afternoon and arrive Saturday morning. I have a feeling I will get more sleep on the train than I have in the past four nights combined.
