We got up early this morning to get ready to catch the 9am shuttle into town. After yesterday it felt surprisingly warm when I stepped outside. What was also a surprise was that the 'shuttle bus' was actually a shuttle car!! It held 6 people!! Luckily we got in first because a couple of trips had to be made. We found the start of our trail to Patricia Lake and headed off and up through the trees. We were told at the information centre to look out/keep away from bears and elk and to make plenty of noise (it's not a good idea to surprise a wild animal!!) We found some big sticks to a, aid us with our walking, and b, tap on trees and rocks to ensure we were making ourselves heard. My trusty stick became known as 'Roger' whereas Kelly's was rather inventively called 'Mr.Stick'! We came to a smaller lake on the way called Cottonwood Slough which we stopped to have a look at, and then carried on on our trail. We did maybe half the trail through the woods, and the final half along the road. We didn't see any wild animals although one reason we decided to carry on along the road was because we found bear poo (you could see all the berries in it and it looked fairly fresh) so we didn't really want to encounter one. It amazes me how some people go and purposefully look for bears- I would actually be terrified if I saw one.

We arrived at Patricia Lake which was pretty. You can see Pyramid Mountain from there and the colours of the stone were lovely- all different tones of orange (you can't really tell from the photos though)

The road and the woods were eerily quiet. There was hardly anybody around at all, you felt like you were the only people in the world at some points. As we were already at Patricia Lake we decided to carry on further to Pyramid Lake which is much larger. They have a decked area that goes out over the lake which had benches on- it looked lovely. We went over and sat there to eat our lunch while we looked out over the lake and at the fir trees and snow capped mountains- it was incredibly peacefull.

After lunch we started making our way back down to town. We walked around 14km today! Once back in town we headed to Jasper Yellowhead Museum only to find it was closed so we had a wander around the town. There weren't as many shops as we first thought. We stopped off for a cup of tea and a chocolate danish in 'The other bear paw bakery', but after that we found ourselves with not a great deal to do and we had to wait until 5.45pm for the car back to the hostel. We just about managed to find things to fill our time but we came to the decision that we would check out tomorrow after all (we were going to book a 4th night)

From here we head to Edmonton for a couple of nights. Going to chill out tonight and have a lie in tomorrow as we're catching the 1pm Greyhound. We're going to give the 9am shuttle a miss and just pay for a taxi to the coach station later instead.

It should take around 5 hours to get to Edmonton from here.