On the Road to Jasper

Day 3 of our travels to northern Alberta took Bob and me from Peace River to Jasper, a 6-1/2 hour drive with some brief stops along the way. The first stop came on Highway 2, as we approached the village of Brownvale. An abandoned farm caught our eye as we drove by it and we couldn’t resist its 1/2 dozen dilapidated buildings, a bonanza of photo subjects.

I’m choosing to share my favourite one today, a leaning structure, largely obscured by grass, bushes and trees invading its space over the years.

Turning southward toward the City of Grande Prairie, we crossed the Dunvegan Valley on this suspension bridge over the Peace River.

Turning my attention northward, I captured this shot of a bend in the Peace River as it flows through the Dunvegan Valley.

Our stops to this point were brief, enough time to take a couple of shots before continuing on. We drove pretty much non-stop until we emerged from the prairies of Peace Country and approached the Rocky Mountains, near the town of Grande Cache.

We saw some promising photo sites as we approached the town and chose to stop at the Grande Cache Tourism Centre to inquire about locations to photograph. The woman we spoke to immediately announced, “You need to go to Sulphur Gate.” She wasn’t wrong. We spent probably an hour there and took many pictures from the elevated platforms, staged along the edge of the canyon. The remainder of today’s pictures are from Sulphur Gate, four favourites of mine.

This first picture features an overview of the Willmore Wilderness Area, with Smoky River in the foreground and Mount Mawdsley in the distance.

Mount Mawdsley looked intriguing so I took a magnified shot using a telephoto lens at a focal length of 195 mm. Not bad from a distance of 7.2 km (4.5 miles).

This gap in the rock offered an unusual glimpse of the Smoky River below. This narrow opening shows an interesting combination of a severe rockface with an aspen forest atop it. And of course, it’s backgrounded by the omni-present Mount Mawdsley.

This is a view of that same area from a position further along the trail.

That concludes my photographs for Day 3 of our trip. After leaving Grande Cache we entered Jasper National Park. Soon after, we reached the Town of Jasper, Alberta, where we spent our final night before embarking on the final leg of our journey, homeward bound.

Here’s a sample picture from the fourth day of our trip, taken along the Icefields Parkway en route to Canmore.