16 June – Lake Louise to Jasper

We discovered that the campsite was next to the railway, and right near a crossing. Train horns sounded most of the night. Don’t the drivers need to sleep?

Headed off from Lake Louise on the way to Jasper. That is as far north as we will go, as we are running short of time. We turned off the Trans-Canada highway, on the Ice Fields Parkway. It was a spectacular drive. Within about an hour we saw our first glacier – Crowfoot glacier overlooking Bow Lake. It was very pretty – the glacier ice was a bluey colour and the lake was covered in ice floes. 

Despite the ice there were ducks splashing about in the water. The mountains were very sheer and lots of places where we could see that avalanches had been through cutting great swathes through the conifer trees that were clinging tenuously to the cliffs. As we travelled there were lots of lakes, and even the rivers were a lovely teal or turquoise colour. More glaciers!

We saw big horned sheep at the Saskatchewan River crossing, and two more black bears but it was too hard to stop because there were tour busses pulled up so the passengers could take pics.

We arrived at the Columbia Icefield for the Athabasca Glacier tour. We had bought tickets in Banff, so we queued up for the bus that takes you from the car park to the edge of the glacier.

The trip took about 10 mins, winding along a road to the end of the glacier and then parallel to it for a while. Then we arrived at the transit centre and changed from a bus to the Snow Coach. It was like a bus, but on 6 really big tractor wheels and a top speed of only 14km / hr. This took us up and over the moraine (rock wall pushed up by the glacier as it heads down the valley) and down a 32% grade to the glacier itself. 32% is pretty steep! We crawled along the glacier in the Snow Coach. The driver filled us in on the details of the glacier. It is moving at about 2 inches a day, and is changing so fast that the road is re-graded 3 times a day. Even in the 2 hours the driver had been on duty, he said that new bumps and channels had formed in the road. Once the ice tours stop for the winter, it takes only 2 weeks until the road is gone and there is no trace that it had been there. However, since 1987 the glacier has receded 1.5 km because it is melting faster than it is replenishing. It is only 5 km long now.

We got out about half way up the glacier. It was blowing an absolute gale. On glaciers the cold air runs downhill, so even if it is fairly calm there will be a breeze off the glacier. The wind gusts were pretty challenging to walk around in, but we had a walk around and took pictures. The meltwater was everywhere, running in streams, and filling holes in the ice. The glacier was surrounded by massive mountains, and several other glaciers were in valleys higher up. The ice where we were standing was around 300 meters thick and 600 years old. Underneath the glacier the thermal heat of the ground around the area has melted the ice and created a massive lake. One day the ice will melt completely and expose the lake.

After about 25 minutes on the glacier, we were ready to get back in the Snow Coach when the driver honked the horn. On the way back down, he explained to us that one of the mountains along the glacier, Snowcone, is a triple continental divide and one of only 2 (the other is in Siberia). That means that melt water from the mountain ends up in 3 different oceans, the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Arctic.  The roof of the Icefields centre has expansion gaps in it that allow it to expand up to a meter because of the temperature changes. It gets to minus 50 degrees in winter (!) and can be 25 to 30 degrees in summer.

We headed back onto the highway, and not far up the road we saw a grizzly bear! It was in the trees on the side of the road, and very hard to get a picture of. We got a long range picture that wasn’t great.

We arrived at Jasper and into a looong queue to get into the campsite. Being a Saturday night and only the one campsite in Jasper, everyone was there. Finally parked up and we went to a place called Tekarra Lodge for a meal. It was really nice, and they had tasting serves of wine (115ml) so we tasted a few Canadian reds. Not too bad. We also found out that this lodge was a favourite dinning place for Marilyn Monroe while she was in Jasper filming “The River Of No Return”. On the way back to the RV, we scared the bejeesus out of a young male elk that was about to cross the road. The look he gave us just before he bolted said “I can cope with people, cars, RVs, bicycles….but WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU RIDING!”