Icefield Parkway, Jasper and Banff National Parks – 104 Miles
Today was a glorious day, both in terms of weather and scenery. 42 degrees at wake-up, with the sun peeking through fluffy white clouds, and it stayed that way all day. By the end of the day it was in the high 70’s and we even pulled out the shorts we hadn’t worn since the first couple of days of this journey.
We were out of the campsite and on the road by 9:00 am. By the time we’d gone ten miles we had already stopped a half dozen times for photo ops. I’ve run out of superlatives to describe this grandiose slice of God’s glorious creation. This is surely one of the best, if not the best drive in all of North America. Everyone reading this should make it a goal to visit this wonderful place. As you drive it’s hard to keep your eyes on the road. Every time you look up, there’s a new vista to see. As you drive past each mountain, its character changes completely with your point of view. It’s such a jumble of peak after peak, ridge after ridge that it’s hard to make sense of the geology of this range. Gargantuan slabs of rock, thousands of feet thick seem to be uplifted at all angles, like a giant fist from deep within the earth punching upward and pushing through the crust, leaving the surface of the earth skewed left and right, north and south, east and west. The ranges to the west seem higher, and it’s in the heart of these mountains that the icefields lay. Glaciers large and small stream down the intervening gorges, some almost reaching the floor of valley, but most terminating high up on the mountain face in cliffs of ice hundreds of feet tall. On many of the north-facing slopes there are mini-icefields where the snow never melts but just keeps piling up with each seasons’ snowfall, creating miniature glaciers all of their own. They are not really glaciers per se, however, since they are not large enough nor deep enough for gravity to compress the snow into solid ice. These snow fields shear off as they reach the steep cliff faces, and with binoculars you can actually count the seasonal layers of snow like tree rings. Some of the ridge tops have snow cornices at least a hundred feet high. I can’t imagine what it must be like up here in winter – they must have hundreds of avalanches every day on these steep faces.
Our first stop of note was at a place called Sunwapta Canyon. The Sunwapta River upstream runs wide and shallow through a broad, silt-filled valley until it hits what appears to be the terminal moraine of the ice-age glacier that carved the valley. Even to my untrained eye, I can picture what happened as the ice receded. First, the water from the melting glacier must have filled the valley behind the dam created by the terminal moraine, creating a lake. Then, as the level of the lake reached the top of the moraine/dam, it started to cut a small channel through the top of the dam. It continued to cut deeper and deeper, creating a steep, vee-shaped canyon through the entire length of the accumulated rock, sand, and silt that formed the moraine. Anyone who has seen the canyon below the falls of the Yellowstone River in the park by that name will recognize what this looks like. Eventually the eroding action of the canyon-cutting process and the accumulation of more silt behind the dam equalized, leaving the stream as we see it today, meandering through the resulting flat valley floor, then boiling through the canyon and out into another broad valley below.
Another notable feature we stopped to see is the Mistaya Canyon and Falls. Similar to the Athabasca Falls we saw yesterday, this is an even narrower, more contorted slot cut by the river through solid rock over the course of thousands and thousands of years. This canyon can’t be more than ten feet wide in places; in fact, it’s so narrow and twisting that you can barely catch glimpses of the roaring water deep down in the slit of rock below. The sides of this narrow canyon, where they’re visible, show a history of the scouring action of the silt-filled water, as you can see the potholes reamed in the face of the rock at the various ancient levels of the river. What a lesson in the power of nature!
Roughly halfway between Jasper and Lake Louise, just north of the border between Jasper and Banff National Parks, is the Athabasca Glacier. This large glacier is one of the main outlets of the Columbia Icefield which fills the mountain valleys to the west. No one knows how deep the ice is in this field, but it’s estimated to be 2000 feet. The icefield covers an area of approximately 130 square miles – almost as big as the Harding Icefield above Seward, Alaska. The Athabasca Glacier is receding fairly rapidly; within the past century it reached almost to the location of the road, and fifteen hundred years ago it reached all the way across the valley to the location of the large, modern visitor center. This visitor center is a popular stop because of its interpretive exhibits, its fine cafeteria (we had a mid-morning snack of hot chocolate and a muffin), and the views of the glacier and icefield beyond. Directly across the road there is a parking lot and trail which leads right up to the toe of the glacier. Also at the visitor center one can arrange bus tours that take you right up onto the glacier itself.
The Icefield Parkway continues south toward Lake Louise, crossing over a couple of passes, one not quite 6700 feet and the other slightly over 6800 feet. These mark the highest elevation of our trip so far; the previous highpoint was in Wyoming on Day 1 when we topped, if I remember correctly, 6300 feet. At one point the road parallels a long ridge for about five miles. The face of this ridge is almost vertical for at least a couple of thousand feet except for a series of random rock shelfs. Each shelf is home to a mini-forest of dark green conifers, completely cut off from each other and from their cousins in valley below. Also along the way the road passes several beautiful, turquoise-colored mountain lakes. These lakes get the brilliant turquoise color from the glacial silt, sometimes called glacial flour, that remains suspended in the water. On our catamaran tour from Skagway to Juneau, they had a sample of this fine silt that they had painstakingly extracted from water from the toe of a glacier. It is a very fine, talc-like powder, quite similar in appearance to the flour used in baking. I forget the details of the settling process it took to obtain the small sample of powder, but it was something like five gallons of water to produce enough of the powder to fill the bottom of a typical spice jar to approximately one-half inch. And it took weeks for the silt to settle in a calm jar – any agitation at all and it remains suspended. That’s why glacial streams are always a muddy, light gray color. It’s only in a lake where the water has a chance to calm somewhat and better refract the sun’s rays that it takes on the turquoise color.
We reached our destination for the day, the Lake Louise Campground, at about 2:30. Knowing this is an extremely popular spot, our first order of business was to check in and secure a campsite. We then drove up the 5 kilometers to Lake Louise itself. I’m sure almost everyone has seen photos of this pristine mountain lake and the European chateau-style hotel on its shore. This was originally developed as a tourist destination by the Canadian Pacific Railway to lure wealthy eastern tourists to these far western reaches of Canada. They outdid themselves, because today the shores of the lake were teeming with thousands of tourists from every part of the world. There was a large parking dedicated to tour buses alone, and hundreds of mainly elderly couples with tour I.D. badges, spending their grandchildren’s inheritance on a trip of a lifetime. Who can blame them? This is a bucket list destination for sure. The backdrop of the lake is a grandiose, snow-covered mountain ridge with a rapidly-receding glacier feeding the lake. There is a canoe concession near the hotel, and on this bright, calm day there must have been thirty or forty canoes out on the lake. The hotel grounds are a gardener’s delight, with beds and baskets of brightly colored flowers everywhere. Trails set out in all directions, like spokes on a wheel. We overheard someone say there are more than 120 miles of trails in this immediate area alone. We walked up one of these, a wide, level path, almost to the head of the lake, a distance of roughly three-fourths of a mile each way. From the opposite side of the lake there was a grand view of the hotel and the slopes of the Lake Louise Ski Basin on the far side of the valley.
It’s been a long day, a fabulous day, a dry day at last, and a day to remember. The only thing that’s lacking is a wi-fi connection so I can upload this and the last two days’ reports to our blog. We’re not lost, friends, just out of wi-fi range.
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