Monday night we had decided that we did in fact want to go check out the town of Jasper, so Tuesday morning we started out.
We stopped at Athabasca Falls, and found the following sign. We love the picture. It's greatly amusing.
There's a nice walkway around the falls, allowing you to see just about every part of it. There's a cool little canyon area to walk through where supposedly the water went through ages ago and now does not.
The falls themselves are quite spectacular. The river's pretty wide, but funnels into one area to drop off, then divides and keeps dropping. It was really loud, and creating quite a bit of spray. One young man died there a few years back - he was hiking and somehow fell in. They now have a bench dedicated to him.
We made it on up to Jasper and stopped at Snaring River Campground. It was a fairly large campground, but relatively empty. We found a nice shady spot (as it was roasting by then), set up the tent, ran around looking at the town of Jasper, came back to camp, had lunch, and refilled on water. A few of the campgrounds we stayed at had huge water "buckets" like these:
At first we were slightly skeptical of them, but the water seemed to taste fine (though not super cold) and others were using it, so we figured it was fine. Apparently the best way to haul water into a campground without running water.
Sitting in the still air of the campground, we decided we needed to cool off somehow. Luckily there was the Snaring River on the edge of the campground. Beautiful, eh?
We waded around in the cold water and cooled off. Alodia sat in the shade reading, while Kevin decided to busy himself with creating rock towers. There were half a dozen already built, but they were small rock towers - 4-5 smallish rocks creating the tower. Kevin set about making a few more with larger rocks.
However Kevin had found a "perfect" rock for a larger tower. The way it sat wasn't adequate as a base, so Kevin scooted around the whole rock digging smaller rocks out from around the edges.
He tried moving it then, but it was still stuck in the ground (I suspect the moving water around it didn't help any). So he wandered off and found a couple sticks upstream to use as leverage.
He dug around the rock with the sticks, and then shoved one around under the rock and pulled on it as a pry bar to get the rock moved a bit out of the ground. He got it enough that he could push on it with his hands and that seemed to work better, until he shoved it so far over without moving himself that he got high centered.
(notice both feet off the ground! It was so hilarious - I barely got this picture I was laughing so hard!)
Victory!
After "rolling" along a few more large rocks, building "ramps" from rocks to help lift them onto the stack (almost getting a hernia along the way), rearranging and rebuilding (they have a tendency to fall suddenly) he had built quite the rock tower!
Overall he made about 15 or so rock towers varying in size. Was kinda cool as you walked out to the river and suddenly see a whole bunch of rock towers. The next morning Kevin went to check on them, and only a couple had collapsed.
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