GDT kms: 36.6

We woke up and tried to leave the hostel quietly to grab breakfast at Coco’s Cafe again – the hostel is quite nice, but my one complaint is all the doors are very heavy and hard to open/close quietly. We got there right when they opened and needed to wait a few minutes for them to set everything up. After breakfast, we went back to the hostel, finished packing all our stuff up and then dropped our keys in the checkout box and started making our way towards the highway.

This section probably has the most difficult start of them all – you need to tear yourself away from a lovely and hiker-friendly little town to walk for 20km on a highway shoulder with your pack the heaviest it’s been so far. It was a cool day though which we were pretty thankful for – walking on the highway in the heat would be miserable. We also got to see some wildlife on the highway – three deer right when we were leaving Jasper and then one elk about 10km along. The majority of the highway was mind numbingly boring and monotonous though and we just plugged into our podcasts and plodded along.

After they highway, we followed a dirt road for a bit and then turned onto the trail we’d follow for the rest of the day. The trail was a bit brushy at times, but overall in good condition which was nice. We really weren’t sure what to expect in this section and it seems like we’ll get decent trail for at least the first two days which is nice.

We got to our campsite just before a creek and were eating our dinners when Arisa arrived – she’s going to be resupplying at Mt Robson, so we probably won’t see her again after tomorrow.