Tuesday, July 25th: Muddy Hell

Last night was the most stressful moment of the trip by far.  It topped them all.  We left Dawson Creek around 8pm after having a quick meal at the picnic table outside the visitor center.  It was getting late, but the time difference had us all feeling like it was 7pm and everyone was in a good mood after the Walmart ice cream we fed them.  We decided to press on as far as we could so we could maximize our time at Jasper the next day.

Only problem was, it was now getting dark at night the further south we got.  Which made finding things a bit tricky.  We had just passed Grand Prairie and it was around midnight, the kids were watching movies and were fine but Tim was getting tired (he has only allowed me to drive ONE hour of this trip so far!  He can’t relax with me driving.  Remember the story I told you yesterday?  I wasn’t driving that day, but he felt more comfortable keeping an eye on the gauges as we drove so he could make sure nothing like that happened again.  I’ll be honest, I am not the most observant and I have a bit of a lead foot.  Hauling things and paying attention to gauges is not my strength.  And he certainly didn’t trust the teenagers.  So, I have time to write a blog…

Ok, back to driving in the darkness in Alberta, Canada.  Tim was tired and I don’t blame him.  If he was ready to stop, it was time to stop.  He saw a sign for a campground and turned in.  I scrambled to look at the information in the Milepost - 60 sites on a lake, $25 a night, 3 miles down a dirt road... I asked if he didn’t want to wait for the free one 15 miles up the road but Tim said he was done.  About 100 feet in we realized that we had made a terrible mistake.  The road was horribly muddy.  The van made an odd movement.  “Are we sliding?” I asked.  We most definitely were, fishtailing like we were driving on an icy road.  And I suddenly remembered a note I had seen earlier about this spot marked in red ink, very muddy if wet…Since it was dark, we couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead at a time so we relied solely on Tim’s driving skills as we were forced to continue.  There was absolutely no way we could turn around in this muck.  I was so grateful for all those years Tim grew up driving in snow country in NY.  He was an excellent driver and really knew how to deal with sliding and downshifting, when to brake and accelerate to keep us from sliding off the road, getting stuck on an incline, or getting stuck in general.  The stress of imagining what we would have to do if one of those things happened was almost unbearable.  I know we were both praying under our breaths and I was glad the kids were oblivious with their heads in a movie screen.  Scenarios of what we would have to do if we slid off the road kept running through my head.  In the mud, in the dark with no one around, with all these kids??  By the grace of God, we made it to the campground.  Tim and I were both shaking from the stress of that 3 miles.  I didn’t even want to think about getting back out in the morning - how was I going to sleep tonight with that to look forward to??  It was one of those moments where you felt rather foolish for getting yourself into such a predicament with 7 kids and a front wheel drive van towing a camper in the middle of NOWHERE.   Because there was absolutely no one out here.  Not even park rangers.  It was one of those self-registering kind of places.

It took us some time to get the camper situated into a spot in the dark.  By 1:30am we had finally settled and then it took our usual set up time to drag everything out that was stored in the camper so we could set up the beds for the night. Things on shelves are put on the floor for driving that need to be put back up, propane bottles cushioned in the bathroom put outside, the grill, the tire, the generator, the rack of wet laundry from the hot springs that was STILL WET, the coolers full of salmon, the car box with things like the jack, jumper cables, etc… popping out the beds and pulling out sleeping bags and pillows.  It’s a process that we have down pretty good by now but in such a tight space there’s still a lot of tripping over each other and bickering and arguing and… ugh.  But we did finally sleep.

My watch went off at 6:30am - 7:30 here bc I hadn’t changed the time yet.  As I shut if off I heard a few drops on the camper.  I listened carefully. Was it rain or was it just dew dripping off the trees?  I waited.  More drops.  I went to look out the camper door to see what the weather looked like, hoping to see blue skies and sun and DRYNESS in our future.  But it was not to be.  A grey cover hovered over everything and the drips were becoming full on rain.  I ripped Tim’s sleeping bag off of his head.  “It’s raining.  Should we leave now before it gets even wetter?”  Tim was up in a second, “Absolutely, yes, we gotta go.”  We had said the night before that we had hoped it wouldn’t rain otherwise we would be in real trouble getting out.  At that time the sky was clear with stars.  This morning, not so much.  We roused the kids, “Get up, now.  We have to leave immediately.  Pack your sleeping bags, help get things in the camper.  You know the drill. We have to move NOW.”  We had to reverse everything I just described and by now it was really rainy.  Puddles were forming and I was trying not to think about what that 3 miles looked like.  Teenagers, as I’m sure you know, are slow movers in the morning and that had been our experience this entire trip.  We were on vacation and we didn’t push too hard most of the time.  Thankfully, despite trying to keep our cool so everyone didn’t panic, the kids took the urgency in our voice seriously for a change.  We were in the van and moving out by 6:45 on the dot (by my watch).  I was proud of them.  And I told them so.  “Thank you guys for being on it this morning.  I’m really proud of you moving so quickly.  We did that in under 15 minutes. Now pray really hard that we can get out of here.”

“At least I can see this morning,” Tim comments. “Is that really better?” I asked as a sheet of mud coated the hill in front of us.  “Ignorance is bliss…”  But it did make things better.  Tim was able to think ahead a little bit.  I was praying the entire drive out but it wasn’t nearly as bad as the night before, but I was super thankful we had left when we did as puddles were forming on the road.  It certainly wasn’t going to get any better. Stop sign ahead to the highway. We made it!  .  “I was praying the entire way,” Abbey shared.  I was too..

Alberta thus far had been boring.  Ugly cities and flat farmland with industrial areas in between.  But as we got closer to Jasper, hills began to form that turned into mountains.  Soon we were in one of the most beautiful areas I think I’ve ever seen.  This was our first time driving through Jasper.  We had always taken a different route in the past - mostly to avoid steep inclines as it goes right through the Canadian Rockies.  As it turned out, there were few inclines and nothing was much worse than anything we had already done.  We will definitely take this route again.  The height of the mountains, the pristine, ice blue lakes, numerous glaciers.  The earth is a magnificent place.  Even the rivers are insanely impressive.  You can feel the force of the water as it blasts through the canyons, mist and spray making it’s way to the safety of the bridges and fencing.  The amount of water that is moving through these rivers must be incredible.

One of the first things we saw was a grizzly! Which was one thing we all had wanted to see so that was exciting. He lumbered right past our car.

We enjoyed a few the easier hikes to keep our time in the park short and sweet and to hit a few highlights.  It’s kind of a bummer to speed through these beautiful places but we had already been on the road going on 6 weeks now and we really did need to be getting home.  But to completely pass up an opportunity when you’re driving right through… well that’s not something we were going to miss.  Sunwapta Falls, Athabasca Glacier, and Mistaya Canyon were the few things squeezed in before it was time to find a place for the night.  Then we ran into a bit of a problem.

Sunwapta Falls

Athabasca Glacier

There were a few first come, first served campgrounds in the park and a few that needed reservations.  The only problem was, we never could make reservations.  We never knew exactly what days we would land where and on top of it, we had no data in Canada.  There was no way to get online to register for anything.  Waterfowl Lake was full, Silverhorn… there were only a few left in the park before we just had to leave altogether and hope to find something outside, but that meant a few more hours of driving.  It was 8pm and we still hadn’t had dinner and we weren’t about to do what we did last night finding a campground in the dark.  We pulled into Mosquito Creek and it was the same: full.  We stopped the camper we had been following in our search for a place to lay our heads for the night and he seemed to be settling in in the round about parking area at the center of the campground.  “Is it full?”  “It is full, but they said we could stay in the parking lot,” he managed to convey in broken English.  So we joined several other campers in the same predicament in the parking lot for the night.  But it was still a pretty nice parking lot with plenty of mountain views and the sound of the creek.  The kids made themselves scarce at the creekside while I cooked up spaghetti with the older kids and soon we were having dinner.  The only thing that was missing was a fire ring to have a fire - it was cold out here!  But it was considerably more comfortable than the night we had stressed through last night.