Jasper through to the Banff Forest

Jasper is a fun mountain town reminiscient of Vail or any other ski resort  town.  It's the wild country outside of the community that is pretty amazing.  Lake Maligne is a ways south of the falls and just gorgeous.  We decided to stop and spend the day.  We took a boat tour into the lake to view the glaciers.  It was very interesting that all of the fish in the lake were stocked there and are not native due to the glacial qualities of the area. So the rainbow trout are regularly restocked but the lake is a dead lake so to speak.   We rode out to spirit island and spent thirty minutes out there hiking and taking hundreds of pictures, because the beauty was such that there really aren't any words.  Spirit Island is unavailable for hiking due to its importance to the Stoney Nakoda tribes.  But we still got some great shots.  The lake lies in a boxed canyon.  Completely boxed in by glaciers.

This is the boat tour boats we used to get across the lake.  It takes about 45 minutes to drive the length of it to Spirit Island.

It's pretty smokey but you can see where the glaciers come together to box in the lake.

Original Boathouse for Lake tours

You can see from the tourquoise color of the lake from the sediment runoff from the glaciers

Spirit Island (Not really an island except for a few days a year)

We were here!