Our road trip across British Columbia had us going from Vancouver to Jasper and Banff National Parks with a short stop in Kelowna in between. The sunny triple digit temps in Kelowna kept us indoors for the majority of the time, and I was finally getting excited about our upcoming outdoors trip in Jasper and Banff. The weather appeared to have changed on the day of our departure from Kelowna. Sunny skies were replaced by overcast haze, and yet temperatures remained high. Any hopes of the skies turning blue were dashed the further east we traveled. What we initially thought were clouds were actually smoke from several wildfires burning in the region. Our hope was that the skies would clear up as we continued to move east.

After seven hours of driving, we arrived at Jasper.

Once our tents were pitched, we took off to check out the nearby Mount Edith Cavell. The drive up is on a narrow winding road.

There are 2 trails, and neither are very long, with the Cavell Meadows trail measuring in at under 5 miles round trip.

We took our time marveling at the sight and polishing off our dinner before heading back to camp. This is about when the wind started to pick up with a few raindrops here and there as well as some thunderclaps, and we thought nothing of it. We still hadn’t registered the severity of the storm when we worked our way down the mountain road that was strewn with toppled trees that we hadn’t encountered on our way up.

Half an hour after returning to camp we were informed to evacuate the park.

With fires to the east and south of Jasper, the only escape route was westward, back toward the way we had just come from 4 hours ago. By the time we arrived at Kamloops 6 hours later we were done. Done as in this trip. Woke up the next morning discovered that the Icefields Parkway (one of the main reasons for this trip) linking Jasper and Banff was shut down, and decided to head home instead of driving 6 hours east again to hit Banff, which we’ve been to in the past.

• Canada
• Hiking
• National Parks
• Travel