Touring the sights of Jasper town takes about 15 minutes at a push (the Marmot Basin ski area situated 19-km away notwithstanding) - with this completed our merry band left the hotel and began driving south through Jasper National Park towards Banff for our best sightseeing day of the trip.
The scenery along the highways we'd seen so far was beautiful enough, but withing the National Park boundaries it reaches a whole new level. Pictured below is Medicine Lake, which is so called because the aboriginal people's believed the draining away of the lake's waters every summer was due to 'big medicine', or magic. The way in which the jagged rock give way to the cool, soft edges of the frozen remainders of the lake is singularly beautiful.
A little way further off the highway was Malinge Lake, notably different for its being rung by thick everygreen forests. Perhaps it was the skier in me but I couldn't help thinking "I could really rip some turns through these" as we walked along their edges.
Next stop was Athabasca Falls, smaller in scale than Helmcken seen the previous day, but with a far more complex arrangement of eroded rocks. The interplay between frozen water, the running stream and the smoothed rocks, almost organic in their shape and formation, was unlike anything any of us had seen before.
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