7canzers

It’s not our anniversary now,  but we do always hope to get away without the kids once a year, for our ‘anniversary’.  The middle of October is not usually prime adventuring time in terms of warm weather, but it so for being alone.  Everyone else seems to have curled up at home, and put away summer gear, and replaced it with winter.

And to be fair, we would have stayed at home too, if not the the stella weather forecast, that perfectly fell on our window of opportunity!!  We had planned a 3 night getaway to paddle the length of Maligne Lake.

As we left Jasper, we came across a herd of Elk.And right from the beginning we had this jaw-dropping beautiful land to ourselves.  The tourist boats were moored for winter.Spirit Island is one of the most photographed locations in Canada.  We hang out there for probably two hours and didn’t see a soul.We paddled 23km to the end of the lake,to our destination at Coronet Creek Campsite.The next day we headed back to Fisherman Creek campsite,which was located in a beautiful bay.The days are short, so it was easy to get some shots of the night sky.The weather was unbelieveable amazing.  Blue skies, and glassy smooth lake, but it was cold.  We guesstimated that overnight low’s were about -8, and we were waking up to a good amount of frost on our tent.  I slept in my down jacket in my down sleeping bag!!And it was hard to keep toes warm when we started out in the mornings.Some places, the lake was even starting to freeze over!!Because this area is crazy popular you have to book your campsite and stick to your schedule.  Because we hadn’t seen a soul, we decided that we wouldn’t keep to our schedule and instead of staying two nights at Fisherman Creek, that we would paddle to another campsite that was brand new, and we hadn’t known existed when I booked our trip.  We had gotten lulled into a false sense of alone-ness.  We started to see other boats.  Whaaaat?  This is our lake!!! And we got to the campsite (that we weren’t booked into!) and it was full.  Oops.  It was the weekend by now.  And because you are only allowed to camp in designated spots, we had nowhere to camp.  We dawdled and enjoyed hanging out in a few bays,

And ended up paddling back to the launch area.  We went for a run on some of the trails, and decided to head back to Jasper and hotel it for the night.  So instead of 3 nights, 4 days, we only had 2 nights, 3 days.  But honestly, it was one of the most magical trips ever!!