After a relaxed morning, I headed toward the Emerald lake parking lot. It wasn’t my original plan, which was to head to the Takakkaw falls parking lot. However, a Mother and daughter from the campsite were willing to drive me to the Icefields Parkway junction with the T-can from where they were parked at Emerald lake. However, they were taking the harder and longer way to get there, which I didn’t feel like doing since I had already done most of that route on my first day out of Field. So, we decided that they would look for me there but they understood that I might get a ride with someone else instead of waiting for them. I headed off through the forest, which opened up to views of another waterfall.

The trail made it’s way down to a type of flood plain, where there were flags to mark the way through the different water channels before coming out on Emerald lake’s shore. There were a lot more people at the lake and even people canoeing on it.

As I neared the parking, it was downright crowded on the path and there seemed to be several hundred people lined up for the gift shop/canoe rental. I came up to a group of people who were looking at something in the forest. They whispered that it was two bears and showed me a video of them. I hadn’t seen any signs of bears the whole time I was in Yoho so I almost had thought that they didn’t like the area, but this proved me wrong. Since there was no sign of them any more, after waiting a couple minutes I moved on.

The parking lot was overflowing with people parked along the road out of it. I walked along until I saw a car that looked like it was leaving and asked for a ride. It turned out that it was a group of 3 Czechs and 1 Slovakian who had been at at chrystalography conference in Calgary and who were very happy to have a hitchhiker. They even offered me all the food that they had, so I got to enjoy an apple along the way. Apparently Czechia and Slovakia are the place to go if you want to see old people garden in their underwear, at least in the countryside. I’m not sure they sold their countries to me.

They dropped me off at the Icefields Parkway and I was only there a minute before a car stopped for me. It was a man who lives in Jasper and who was returning home from Calgary. He seemed happy to have someone to chat with for the hour it took to get to Saskatchewan River Crossing where I’m staying at the Crossing ‘Resort’. It’s out of the 70s, a sort of motel with a gas station, restaurant, cafeteria and general store. It was very busy midday and I retired to a common room to relax and wait for my room to be ready after spending $35 on a sandwich and salad for lunch. At least the view would be nice if it wasn’t so smoky.

I finally checked in and did some sorting of things before heading to their restaurant for dinner. I had a bison burger, which was a first for me and very similar to beef.