Tuesday, June 20, 2023. One of the things on our list for our time in Jasper was to explore Malign Canyon. Based on my research beforehand, I knew there were trails and a series of bridges back and fourth across the canyon, so we could kind of choose our own adventure in terms of how far we wanted to go before heading back to the parking area.
After surveying the geocache map, we decided to go to at least as far as the third bridge, which would be far enough to get an EarthCache and a traditional. The latter was exciting because there weren’t a lot of physical caches available in this stretch of the trip and I was ready for something to actually find.
It was quickly apparent before we even left the parking lot that the area was going to be a sloppy mess. There was still snow on the ground, but the temperature was well above freezing so everything was melting. The parking lot had several large puddles, and the trail was no different. There was also quite a bit of tree damage here, too, some of it affecting the trails.
Despite the mess, this was a pretty fun area to explore. There are several theories about how it was formed, but my favorite is that a glacier scraped the top off of an existing cave. It is very deep in some parts, and each of the bridges we crossed was marked with it’s height above the canyon. The highest was 51 meters, or about 167 feet. We timed how long it took to drop a snowball to the river below; it was nearly 4 seconds!
The EarthCache we were working on asked for quite a bit of information, and I couldn’t find one of the signs I needed. After we were well past it, I realized that a tree had fallen right on top of it. Luckily there was a fence behind it to hold it up just enough that I could duck underneath and still read the sign.
Once we got past the third bridge, we decided to go a little bit further and continued to the fourth. It was a little less exciting than the others, but the hike was still beautiful despite the tree damage.
On our way back, we took a different path to get to the traditional cache. This one was not paved and involved a lot more elevation changes and tree dodging. When we got to the coordinates, I realized it was a micro (about the size of a film canister) and the snow was going to make this search difficult if it was on the ground as the hint implied. We spent quite a bit of time with the four of us looking, and tried to use pictures from previous logs to help us find it but didn’t have any success. Everyone was ready to give up, but I decided to check one more spot…and there it was!
The rest of the walk back to parking was more of the same. Despite the weather, the area was pretty crowded and the parking lot was even more full than when we arrived. We considered getting lunch at the restaurant there, but the girls didn’t see anything they would eat on the menu. We realized as we left that the parking lot was so full in part because a second parking lot next to a viewpoint was closed due to downed trees.
As we got back to Jasper for lunch, we decided to redirect from our original choice because it looked more expensive/fancy than we were expecting. Instead, we ended up at Famoso which turned out to be a great choice. They serve pizzas made in a wood fired oven. The girls weren’t overly thrilled with their cheese pizzas (they’re boring), but Amber and I got a really tasty chicken and pesto pizza.
