Today we went for a cruise on Maligne Lake (pronounced mÉ™-LEEN). We were booked on the 11:30am boat, and the lake was an hour drive away from the campsite, so we packed up camp and left quickly in the morning. We got there at about 11am, so relaxed with a coffee for a while until our boarding call.
We cruised for 14km along the 22km lake to a place called Spirit Island. Boats aren't allowed to go any further along the lake, as the remainder is protected as a pristine wilderness area, and no motorised craft are allowed in. The dock where we got off is actually on the mainland, but right next to it is a tiny (maybe 20m diameter) piece of land with a few pine trees on it.
This is Spirit Island. Nobody knows exactly why it's called that, or when it started being called that, but it's an important place to the local people who use it to perform annual healing ceremonies for the forest. Along the way, our tour guide told us about the recent wildfires in the area and reiterated a point we keep hearing that fires really are good for the forest, and human's effort to suppress them has been very damaging to the ecosystem. She also talked about the unusual 'J' shape of the Queen Elizabeth Range, whose mountains define the southern shore and eastern tip of Maligne Lake.
We marvelled as the water changed from a deep green colour at the beginning of our cruise, to full-on aquamarine as we reached Spirit Island. The incredible colouring is caused by rock flour in the glacial runoff that fills the lake, which produces a prism-like effect that reflects only green and turquoise light. The colour changes through the lake because the three glaciers that feed the lake are located a the southern end, past a natural bottleneck. This bottleneck slows the flow of silt along the lake, and by the time the water reaches the northern end where the boathouse is most of the rock flour has settled.
At the Spirit Island dock, we used a $250,000 bathroom, which was solar powered and self-contained, but with flushing water!
We walked around a short track, stopping often to take lots of photos. The view was truly amazing. We'd learned that Malign Lake had become popular back in the '50s when Kodak ran its Colorama competition. A guy called Peter Gales hiked and canoed out to Spirit Island where he camped for several days, waiting to get the perfect shot. His photograph was hung in New York’s Grand Central station and became one of the most iconic views of the Canadian Rockies.
After a too-short 15 minutes, we had to get back on the boat and head back to base. We stood out the back of the boat for most of the trip home, watching the mountains and forest go past. The captain slowed the boat whenever we got near any canoers so that we didn't cause them any strife with our wake.
Once back on land, we hiked for about an hour around a forest path, which eventually made its way back to the carpark. We weren't really expecting the track to be this long, and Katie kept checking the map on her phone to make sure we weren't heading up into the mountains. We drove back to Jasper and shared a burger and beer at the Jasper Brewing Co.
To finish off the afternoon we headed up to Pyramid Lake, up the hill a bit behind Jasper. The road was in particularly bad condition, covered in huge potholes, but it looked like they were in the process of fixing it up. We walked out onto Pyramid Island, which was a small island in Pyramid Lake from which you can see Pyramid Mountain. People hire the island for weddings and other events, which seemed like a strange thing to be able to do in a national park.