Another wet day in Jasper… but it’s nothing compared to what is going on further south in Alberta, where we were touring around just two days ago! They have a state of emergency declared around Calgary through to Canmore due to a huge storm cell that dumped a pile of hail on them and is causing flash flooding. Banff is caught up in the middle of it too. :S Horrible thing to happen to any towns, but is it wrong that I’m sitting here feeling relieved to be 250kms north of the whole mess and to have missed it by a couple of days?
Anyway, we were going out to Lake Maligne today but the rain has kinda put the kybosh on that plan somewhat. Instead we ended up at the Yellowhead History Museum and Archive here in beautiful downtown Jasper. Btw, did you know that Jasper the township is right in the middle of Jasper National Park and if you come in here – even if you have no intentions of going hiking or checking out anything in the park proper, you need to have a National Park Pass for the duration? We didn’t. And even though we were planning on doing heaps of activities in the National Parks anyway, and have bought multi-day passes, it would have been good information for hotels and accommodation centres to let you know don’tcha think? Oh well.
We went to the little museum and read up on the natural history of the area, the formation of the glaciers and a whole lot of information on the original European pioneers in this area. Most of them were engaged in the fur trade, but many Europeans were drawn to Canada in the late 1800s in search of unique flora and fauna. And of course the environs attracted cartographers and many of the first pioneers were keen to be the first to climb the biggest mountains they could find up here… and promptly name said mountains after themselves! 😀 Which is why all the mountains have names like Robson, Douglas, Patterson etc… not too many Native American names sitting on the maps.
The museum also held a lot of interesting artefact, well interesting if you were born and raised in Australia and you’ve never seen a bear trap, an old set of snow shoes and things like buffalo coats and hand embroidered or beaded buckskin or moose hide!
Strangely enough the museum was also having a display on Marilyn Monroe (of all people!) because she apparently filmed a movie up here with Robert Mitchum called ‘River of No Return’ (nope, I haven’t seen it) but there are lots of little anecdotes written by locals who remember her being here and lots of gorgeous movie stills of her in the Rockies doing stuff from the film. It was pretty interesting.
Hopefully the weather will clear up and we will get out to Lake Maligne for a look in the morning with gorgeous summer blue skies… but we won’t complain about the weather because the rest of poor Alberta is really copping it. There are whole towns being evacuated, houses and roadways swept away, two people missing presumed drowned, cars all underwater, loads of people cut off from their homes and workplaces and the footage on the TV is just alarming! Reminds me of the flash flooding imagery that came from Toowoomba in 2011. 🙁