Ron & Anne in Canada; 2016: The Icefields Parkway.

We left Jasper quite early, and were immediately rewarded with our first wildlife sighting of the day. Two fully antlered Elk were grazing by the roadside, they are still growing this years antlers so they are still in velvet, these two will be forces to be reckoned with when it comes to the rut in September.

We had intended to go up the sky tram, a cable cabin up the Whistler mountain, but when we arrived there the top was in the clouds, so there was little point in going up there to see white cloud!

We were following the Athabasca river, up to the Athabasca Glacier in the Columbus Icefields. The Athabasca, the same river we rafted yesterday, runs 6200 kms to the arctic ocean in the Hudson Bay, through several lakes and the Mackenzie river on the way.

At one point we left the main road to view the Athabasca Falls, It falls into a canyon some 50 mtrs, at such a rate that a huge fast flowing river is compressed into six foot wide falls in places, to emerge equally fast flowing 60 mtrs wide below.

The day is brightening up a little as we go along, still following the river, some of the mountain views are really stunning, some still in cloud but improving as we go along.

Soon we turned off the road again to visit another falls, the Sunwapta. The same river, not quite as high a drop as the last, but we could see where the river had scoured out a large section of the rock at a turn.

Many of the mountains we pass are over 10,000 feet, Tangle Ridge is a small one at 10,000, there is no snow on the top!

But soon we were to spot our first glacier, the Stutfield. Look closely at the left side and you will see a major avalanche which has fallen several hundred feet.

Then the spectacular Columbus Icefield with huge moraines at it’s base. It falls 2000 feet, indeed we had to go up to 6000 feet to reach the present foot of the Athabasca Glacier. It was quite a climb at that height, but it was more than the climb which took our breath away.

This is just one of the glaciers that flow from the icefield, the runoff from it reaches three oceans, the Pacific, the Atlantic, and from this glacier, the Arctic.

We travelled on past more stunning mountain sights, to Bow Summit. Again it was quite a walk to the top, we nearly gave up, but when we got there the view was spectacular, we looked over the Bow river and the beautiful blue Peyto lake below us, at the foot of the Bow Glacier. At that point we were at 7000 feet, and we knew it!

As we travelled on we came across these two Mountain sheep, they are completely wild and rarely come off the mountains, We think they may have been trying to take salt from the grit at the roadside, which is used for snow clearing in the winter.

I’ll leave you with some of the more spectacular views we enjoyed during the day.