Mileage: 10.7km (plus a few hundred metres to/from the Maligne Lake cafe)

Today was a short day and I really, really appreciated Toothless sleeping in. We all needed it.

The tent was still wet on the outside from last night’s rain. We shut the doors last night to keep warm and ensure we stayed dry so there was some condensation on the inside walls to take care of, but that was a fairly quick task.

Our campsite stayed pretty dry but the diapers we had hanging were no more dry than last night. We used Natasha’s sleep shirt as a morning diaper on Toothless since we had none that were dry enough to use. We expect better weather today and will spend the afternoon at Malign Lake Lodge where we can wash clothes and diapers in the bathroom and dry them on the patio (or the hand driers if necessary!)

I took Toothless to the cooksite and grabbed the Ursacks and started sorting food. The ground was still muddy so I kept him in the carrier.

Natasha took a bit to get the tent down, but everything went fairly smoothly and we got hiking before 9am today.

Toothless was a bit unhappy for the first 30 minutes or so of hiking. Maybe he wasn’t happy about not getting to crawl around at the campsite. I’m not sure. I hope he will be happy with our destination.

The forecast called for 10% chance of rain at 9am and it seems that really meant just fog today. We climbed out of that quickly and it became quite nice out.

This whole part of the trail – from South of Trapper campsite to the trailhead – was maintained in 2019 by the GDTA and the Friends of Jasper group. Natasha and I were on that trip and it was fun seeing how our work has held up a couple years later. Overall pretty good!

We chose to take the “Moose Loop” alternate to change it up and that was a good decision. It was very pretty and the trail was almost a road.

We got to the Maligne Lake Lodge at about 10:30 am and were pleased to see it opens at 9am.

We grabbed a table on the patio, spread some clean but wet diapers and clothes on the bench and table and started our process of eating, drinking, using the bathroom, cleaning clothes and diapers, wiggling with Toothless, and repeating that all again.

We have been in a calorie deficit this section due to how long of a food haul we chose to do. At some point we just had to take food out and depend on going to the Lodge today as well as our reservation at the Shovel Pass Lodge tomorrow to keep our food weight down.

So we ate a lot.

The prices here are not great. We spent a lot but we spent hours there, we got all of our laundry clean, most of our laundry and diapers dry, we ate two lunches, Toothless got to get some variety in his diet, and we got to sit on a bench at a table in the sun. (Although we get benches and tables on the Maligne Pass Trail at campsites, we have not had sun).

After eating we did not feel fantastic. All that food needed to settle. But we need to hike another 5km or so to our campsite.

We bought some chips at the store to take with us for lunch snacks, cleaned up, gathered our now fully charged devices and charged on.

The Skyline Trail is honestly quite easy, and pretty. Tonight we are staying at Evelyn Creek so it’s a short hike. I carried Toothless and he fell asleep almost right away. I plugged in my headset and listened to a podcast. We got to camp an hour later when Toothless woke and my podcast finished. Good timing! It was only 3:30pm. Lots of time to lay laundry out to dry more, set up our tent and just hang out.

Unfortunately another group took the only dry table at the cooksite so Toothless had to crawl around a bunch of puddles. He loved those but it was stressful for me to keep him out!

We ate dinner at a responsible time and got Toothless to bed at around 7pm.

We are dreading the rain tomorrow but looking forward to sleeping indoors and having meals provided.