Hike: Cavel medows, Jasper AB, Canada

Quick Summary

Difficulty: Moderate
Distance: 18 km, (6 km if stying on paths)
Elevation gain: 600m (estmate), (300m if staying on paths)
Time Taken: 4 hours
Cool points: View of Mt. edith cavel, and Angle Glacier. View of Athabaska valley from top of peak.
What it's Not:
Date of Hike:
Recommendations:
Notes: ____

Map of Cavel Medows

"Map is © Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada, Department of Natural Resources. All rights reserved."
map from the website http://toporama.cits.rncan.gc.ca/toporama_en.html

How to get to the trail head

"Follow the Icefields Parkway (Hwy 93), 6.7 km south from jasper to Hwy 93A. turn right and follow Hwy 93A South fro 5.2 km. Turn right onto the Mt. Edith Cavell road, and follow this 14.5 km to the Mt. Editch Cavell parking lot. the Path of the Glacieer/Cavell medows trailhead is on the south side of the parking lot. large recreational vehicles and trailers are not allowed the Mt. Edit Cavell Road. Use the trailer drop off at the begining of the road."
(From: "Classic Hides in the Canadian Rockies", by Graeme Pole)

Ramble on about the hike

group

As you drive up Mt. Edith Cavell road, you will a hostel, and Cavell lake down in the valley to your right. We ended up pullin off the road on the way up to the rail head, we snapped a couple of quick pics. To the left is a picture of our entire group taken at a lake off the side of the road on our way up to the trail head.

Below you see Robert doing a balancing act on one of the posts off the side of the road. He did that to try and get a bit of a better view of the background in the picture.... it sort of worked. I really like his pose in the second picture.

Rob on pole 1 Rob on pole 2

This Hike was one of the ones where we got to the parks fairly late friday night, 'so now what should we do?' kind of hikes. Jive (aka Robert) my hiking buddy from university, knew this was a fairly easy short hike, that would not tire us out to much for the 'real' hike we would be doing Saturday.

So as it was it was quite late when we got to the trail head, around 5pm. It was the dead of summer so we had a fair bit of light time, for the short hike along the paths. We figured that we would be back by 9:00, and set our turn back time for 8:00, sounded good at the time. The trail is well trod upon (for a Jasper trail), it has a resonable parking lot at the trail head.

Practically from the parking lot you can see Angel glacier, it is pretty impressive. Amazingly I did not take a picture. Also you see "Cavell Pond", into which Cavell Glacier slowly flows. We actuly were fortunate enough to see 2 large piceces of glacier fall into the pond. It was pretty cool for us to watch. We also spotted a group of people on the other side of the valley cave exploring in where the water flowed out of cavel glacier.

The hike up along the paths is quite easy, Mt Edith Cavell dominates the area from accross the valley, as you work your way up to the Cavell medows. The picture below you see myself and Dereck who was also with us on the hike. In the background you see the shoulder of Edith Cavell. Eventually we got to the point where the trail loops back, we deciedet to make our way to the top of the medows. This portion of the climb was actually fairly hard, not because the trail was steep, but because it was loose shale. Which I guess is like walking in sand, but it also combines walling on a slope. There is two major changes in the views, the first is as you come to the medows them selves. The trees are gone, and you are looking out over a large alpine medow. The second major change in sceanary occurs when you reach the top of the medow, you get a pretty good drop down in to the Athatbaska valley. That is the view that made the hike for me. The picture to the left does not show the veiw I liked best, I guess we were to awe inspired to take a picture. top view

As usual, we were a bit behind schedule by the time we got to the top of the hill. So we had a short rest, to soak in the surroundings, and started back. The trip back was lot of fun. The shale which so slowed our progress up, was our best friend going down. We were able to almost fly down the hill. We also took advantage of the large packed snow patches that were on the slope. It was pretty fun getting some summer sliding in. Always time to get a goofy looking picture of me (hard to tell the steepness of the slope in th picture) slide down The trip up took about 3 hours, the trip down took about 45 minutes, and it was pretty far into dusk when we got back to the trail head.

Lessons Learned on this trip.

If you are going to bring the Camera... Maybe an extra roll of film is a good Idea too.


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