Day 13 Stone Mountain Provincial Park, Summit Lake Campground

Starting mileage 4847 kilometres. It was a long drive today, roughly seven and a half hours but as usual the scenery was beautiful. As we crossed over back into British Columbia we gained an hour. The past few days, going from Alberta to British Columbia back to Alberta, changing time zones, we gave up keeping track of time. On this trek we saw an extremely large beaver in Beaverlodge, Alberta, and had some fun. We also came upon a very large Inukshuk.

Back on the road, the highway came closer to the mountainside, it was an area known for landslides, thankfully we did not see one actually occur.

Looking at the map, our goal was Northern Rocky Mountain Provincial Park, and being quite late in the day, we stopped at the first campsite along the side of the road, literally. Summit Lake Campground, located in Northern Rocky Mountain Provincial Park is just off the highway facing an enormous stony mountain. There are a total of twenty-eight campsites, and we were at #7. We arrived in the rain, and there were no tall trees to attach the tarp to, so Matt ended up being pretty darn inventive, attaching the tarp to the car, then to the picnic table, using the shovel to raise it up on the table, giving us some shelter from the rain.

This was another self-registration park. I, of course put the envelope in the incorrect box, thus wrote a note to insert in the correct box, explaining my mistake. The park warden came around later to collect the fees, and sell firewood to those lucky ones already at the park. Those who came later, were out of luck, and you could tell by the many unhappy faces, they were not impressed. The park warden came close to kicking out two males, who had collected wood from the area. He threatened them with eviction if they did not return every piece to where they found it, carefully watching their every move. Of course they didn’t pay either, so eviction was even closer, lucky for them, he took their money and let them stay. The next campground was hundreds of miles away.

As we had a sat around our glowing fire, we cooked a wonderful dinner of turkey medallions wrapped in bacon with some cheese tortellini.