Columbia Icefields and the Athabasca Glacier

On Tuesday June 12, we left Canmore, AB early and returned to the Trans-Canada Highway heading westbound this time. The early morning hours brought a squall through the area. We had some pre-dawn rain but there was fresh snow on the slopes several hundred feet higher – beautiful to see as the clouds lifted and the air cleared! We went through the tollbooth at the entrance to Banff National Park and bought day use passes for the very reasonable cost of $9.95 Canadian for adults and $8.65 for seniors. Then we drove back past the exits for the town of Banff and for Lake Louise (and could have stopped again if we wished and had time in the travel schedule) and turned off onto Highway 93 North, Icefields Parkway. The road climbed steeply to a summit at nearly 7,000 feet, above the treeline and in a rugged rocky barren wilderness. We stopped to view yet another waterfall (not the last by any means) called Bridal Veil Falls and entered Jasper National Park.

The Columbia Icefields Visitor’s Center has interesting displays about the geography and climate that created the icefield and its hundreds of associated glaciers. And, more importantly, they offer excursions onto the Athabasca Glacier in a snowcat. Our group was shuttled to the edge of the glacier, boarded a vehicle with huge balloon tires and traveled out onto the glacier. We left the vehicle and were able to walk on the ice, drink some of the glacier melt water and get a close-up view of other nearby glaciers, some part of the Columbia system, some independent. An independent cirque glacier was directly overhead within the peak of a nearby mount while an impressive hanging valley glacier loomed over us as we made our way out and back to the excursion dock. One of the nearby peaks serves as a triple continental divide. Water runs off it into 3 different oceans, the Pacific, the Atlantic and…(Can you guess the third? Yes, the Arctic.) Not surprisingly, it was VERY cold on the glacier. I wore a shirt, sweatshirt, parka, jeans, sweatpants over the jeans, gloves, a knit cap and my parka hood for our 30 minutes out on the ice.

While waiting for the shuttle to the glacier, we were entertained by several mountain goats on an almost vertical cliff above the Visitor’s Center. They were hard to spot with the naked eye but easily followed with binoculars.

We parked our motor home in the lower parking lot of the Visitor’s Center, where we could stay the night. The temperature dropped and it began to snow lightly. The wind picked up and everyone huddled inside our homes on wheels. Steve and I invited Laurie and Dan, who are traveling in a 17 foot Casita (a fiberglass torpedo-shaped trailer), to join us for a movie on our DVD player. They had very limited propane and battery capacity so were worried about staying warm. We set up our catalytic propane heater, kept us all cozy for several hours and enjoyed a DVD. Then we all turned in and bundled up snug in our beds. The overnight low was close to freezing and the cold wind found its way in every crack and poor seal in our units. The light lingered long in the evening, past 11 PM, then reappeared before 4 AM. This is a foretaste of what we should experience in the Yukon and Alaska. The morning was again very windy with light snow flurries so we hitched up quickly and drove off toward the town of Jasper.