Maligne Valley

Back on Friday the 13th of October, after we finished up shooting on the Pyramid Lake Road, Jon and Steve and I decided to take a drive up the Maligne Valley Road.  It was still too early to check into our hotel, and the weather was breaking a little.  Last summer the Excelsior Creek fire burned over into the Maligne Valley from the west.  I had heard stories about how bad it was, and expected the valley to be completely burnt out.  This wasn't quite true....  the lower stretches of the valley, from the Athabasca River almost up to Medicine Lake, were untouched by the fire.  About a quarter mile below Medicine Lake, the fire had burnt over into the valley and had devastated what had previously been heavily overgrown forest.  This time around we never got any further up the valley than the lower end of Medicine Lake.  The scene was quite different from what we had photographed numerous times in the past,  The forest on the west side of the lake was gone, with nothing left but blackened and barren trunks of mostly lodgepole pine.  On the east side of the lake the fire had danced across and scorched most of this area as well.  I guess we should have explored further up towards Maligne Lake, but for whatever reason, we never got around to it.  We wandered about and photographed here for a while before eventually running out of daylight and making our way back towards the Jasper townsite.  We checked into our hotel, unpacked our gear and settled down, looking forward to a better day of shooting on Saturday.

We tied in to our supply of beer and then headed over to a local pub for something to eat.  A couple of pitchers of draught disappeared there before we eventually wandered back to our room.  We attempted to polish off a bottle of Jamieson's that Steve had brought along, but ran out of gas before we finished the task.  We finally turned in, hopeful that Saturday would bring better weather and give us an opportunity to get out and shoot a little more....