After last week’s trip on the Berg Lake Trail I’m feeling much better about having to re-organize our plans. We had one day in between the Berg Lake Trail and now we’re on the Skyline Trail for three nights.
The smoke in Jasper isn’t too bad as we head out to the Skyline trailhead. To get to the Tekerra Campsite we start with a steep uphill on an old 4WD road. It’s easy walking for being so steep and we make good time to when the Skyline Trail turns into a proper trail. From here it skirts around the side of the mountain through a wildflower meadow.
We get to the campsite and start making dinner. Whoa, the mosquitoes are bad here. In the 3 weeks we’ve been in Canada this is definitely the worst. Bug nets out, gloves too. After giving away more protein than we ate for dinner we spend the rest of the evening in the tent.
When we wake up in the morning our water bottles are frozen almost solid, I think it was well below the 4C prediction… The good news is we are able to break camp and eat breakfast before the mosquito onslaught begins again.
It’s a little more smokey this morning and we begin the climb up to the ridgeline. The wind picks up and the smoke starts coming in. Visibility is now pretty low and the smoke is burning my eyes but we carry on heading up the hill, maybe it’ll get better. Unfortunately, an hour later is isn’t any better and I start to hear wheezing from behind me, it’s K, stooped over gasping for air. She’s having an asthma attack. To my knowledge she’s never had asthma and I can see the anxiety in her eyes, not helping matters.
After a couple minutes she calms down and is back to normal. We walk on about 50 yards and it starts up again. We decide to take an extended break and eat lunch. After we’re done she says she’ll give it another go and see what happens. She makes it about 200 yards and starts wheezing loudly again. Not. Good.
We take another break and assess the situation. Strenuous walking is sending K into fits, there’s still some climbing left and then a ways to go to camp after that, and the visibility is so low now we can hardly see more than ¼ mile in front of us. Tomorrow we’d have to go up and over the ridge again to get back to Tekerra campsite for night 3.
As much as it pains us we decide to try to slowly walk back down the ridge and back to Jasper. Seems more prudent than trying to push on. Damn those fires!
We did see this cute marmot though, not all is lost.
If you go:
