Oh Jasper, you fool us every time....

I'm not sure what it is with Jasper, whether the locals like to mess with visitors or they just simply do not know the hikes, or Jasper is in some weird time warp. But it seems both times we've visited things have gone sideways. The last time we were in Jasper was 6 years ago, we were first dating and headed up for the September long weekend. We stopped in at a local cafe for breakfast one of the morning and asked the Barista of a good hike. She recommended Pyramid mountain, saying it was only a 2-4 hour hike. So we picked up some water and food and headed on our way. Now, keep in mind we are pretty fast hikers, this hike took us over 6 hours to do! And we even passed a guy riding up on a bike!

Well 6 years later we finally returned, and it tricked us again. This trip will be remembered as the time we accidentally ran 32 kms. Our weekend didn't start out as planned as our lovely Dog managed to choke his way out of his cone.. again.. and decided to rip the stitches out of his tail for the 3rd time. So we were off to the vet.. again.. Luckily this trip didn't entail (no pun intended) another surgery, they bandaged him up and set up an appointment for the next morning to make sure the wound was closing, otherwise they would have to make a clean cut and put in some more stitches. Frustrated, we postponed our trip by a day, and I spent the evening holding my beautiful week old niece at my mother's new house.

Saturday morning we packed up the car, took Rudy to the vet, and luckily he didn't need any stitches, phew! so we hit the road. Since we were a day late, and we didn't have any reservations we were just hoping to get a spot. The first 4 campsites were full, and one was hard side trailer only, so we kept driving until we hit Pocahontas right by Miette Hotsprings, about 50 kms east of Jasper. It's a first come first serve campsite, and even though it said that it was full we thought we'd take a drive through and we managed to snag a spot! WOO HOO! We went for a little walk to stretch our legs, cooked some pizza on our grill, had a few drinks and sat by the fire.

On Sunday morning we headed back in to Jasper. The plan was to do the Saturday night Lake loop which is labeled everywhere as a 24 km loop with 700 feet of elevation. We thought it would be the perfect trail run. So we set out, I remembered reading that the loop was called the Saturday night lake loop/20 mile loop. So when we found the trail head for the 20 mile loop we set out, Ben mentioned that he thought it was weird that the trail was called 20 mile loop and yet it would only be 24 kms, and I responded with "well, the internet said...." and since the internet is never ever wrong we ignored that early warning sign and continued on. It was a beautiful morning, and we passed a few beautiful lakes. We figured the run would take around 2 1/5 hours. So when we hit 2 hours and it felt like we were in the middle of the forest we realized something wasn't right. But at that point we had no choice, we were committed, our options were to keep going and hope the car would be just around the corner, or turn back and know that we had another 2 hours to go. So we kept going. Alas 3 hours and 52 minutes we were running down some switch backs and the car came into view. Phew! We're not sure if missed something and were supposed to turn somewhere, or if the map just totally lied to us. But it definitely was not 24 kilometers, rather 32 kilometers with quite a bit of climbing. I know that when we stopped at a sports store in town to figure out where this trail head was the lady working there pointed us in the clockwise direction, which according to online is the WRONG WAY, so maybe if we had gone the proper way we would have seen where we should have turned. Oh well, we got through it, we were together and it was a beautiful and challenging run.

Needless to say all 3 of us were very tired, thirsy, and hungry. Luckily all of our food was in the car so we had a feast, drank a gallon of water, picked up some beer and headed back to the campsite. We hung out for a bit before putting Rudy in the tent for a much needed nap and heading up to the Miette Hotsprings. These are probably our favorite hotsprings. It's far enough outside of Jasper that alot of people don't bother to go, or don't know that it's there. They have cold tubs and hot tubs. So we alternated between the 2, and it felt like bliss on our sore legs. After the hot springs we showered and headed in to town for some Sushi! It tasted amazing! We didn't get back to the campsite until after 9, and we were both exhausted so we just headed to bed.

Monday was very uneventful, we just packed up the tent, stopped at a cafe in Jasper for probably the most delicious breakfast wrap I've ever had (cafe mondo) and headed home. It was a fantastic weekend.