July 11: Venturing to Jasper

We had breakfast at Smitty’s in Grande Prairie.  Ardith had a breakfast sandwich.  Jim had a Belgian waffle topped with bacon and egg.  He had that with syrup on top – an interesting combination.

We stopped at the largest town between here and Jasper: Grande Cache, Alberta.  It had a visitors’ center and we needed a potty break.  The inside of the visitors’ center had exhibits about the town and its past, worth about 10 or 15 minutes stay.

The interesting part was outside the center.  They had replicas of native wickiups and tipis and explained how contact with plains Indians had resulted in a change of housing from almost entirely wickiup to almost entirely tipi in the 1800s.

They also had ranger stations and other old buildings in various stages of restoration. 

The piece that enabled Jim to remember the town’s name was a giant platform.  Earlier we had learned and forgotten twice that the name of the raised platforms with cabins on top was a cache, a place for woodsmen to store provisions so critters couldn’t get to them and for trappers to store their furs.  Jim has used the word cache for probably 40 years to describe a place of temporary storage, and it is finally sticking that this was a much earlier use of the same French word.

The lawn was speckled with lots of mushrooms, many were ordinary to us, but we independently "discovered" a clump of really interesting ones and reported the fact to each other.

As we rounded a bend on a fairly steep downhill, we saw what seemed to be smoke ahead of us and thought “oh, no, a vehicle on fire in the road”.  The good news, it wasn’t so.  The bad news is that it was an unnamed industrial plant spewing out something stronger than water vapor.

We drove through a lot of nice country, but it turned spectacular when we got to Jasper National Park.  Below is the first picture Jim took after we entered the park.  He took a lot more scenic pictures today, but we will be saving those and combining them with other pictures of an incredible place in the next blog posting.  This may take a few days, because we have about 1,500 picture of Jasper and it will take a while to sort through them and tell a coherent story about the park.

We checked into the Maligne Lodge (pronounced ma-leen) in the town of Jasper and the really great clerk, Jesse, told us that we had our room upgraded at no cost, due to a tour bus coming in.  They gave us the second largest unit in the place.  We had a really nice living room, a very decent kitchenette, good bath and a solid door connecting to the bedroom with a king sized bed. 

The room was just above the indoor pool in the living room side and had a tiny view of mountains from the bedroom.  The view of the pool was nice, but the heavy chlorine smell and high humidity ensured that we closed our door rapidly when we entered.

While we were exploring the town, we passed a gas station where a family had their 3 kids working diligently to clean the big windows in their RV.  A boy was working on the picture window in the rear, a girl was working side windows and another had climbed onto the hood to scrub the windshield, a task we knew was very necessary.  They seemed to enjoy their tasks.

One of the restaurants suggested by our lodge clerk was Papa George’s.  We decided to try it and were super pleased.  To start with, it had a nice view (albeit, through a parking lot) of mountains.

The food was decidedly different and enticing.  They had a decent number of game meat dishes on the menu and Jim is always up for something different.  He chose two appetizers as his meal.  One was called Elk pot pie.  It had elk loin, wild mushrooms, pearl onions and a wine sauce topped with puff pastry.   It was amazing.  His second dish was Crispy Alberta Boar Belly.  Think of a super thick piece of bacon with a tangy taste.  It was accompanied by a sweet-tangy apple cranberry chutney and mixed root vegetables fried in a duck sauce.  The latter was one of the best vegetable dishes Jim has ever had.  Ardith had a rack of Australian Lamb with brandy and apricot pudding (think Yorkshire pudding, not vanilla).  Her dish also had charred asparagus and an excellent potato salad.

“If the meal was this good we must try their desserts.”  We did and weren’t at all disappointed.  Ardith had Coffee and Chocolate Bread pudding.  The special thing about this superb dish is that its “bread” was crushed croissants.  Jim’s great ginger crème brulee was topped with caramelized apples.  Even the cookie was amazing.