Ice Field Parkway

Today, we’re heading down from Jasper to Lake Louise on the Ice Field Parkway. The weather is absolutely gorgeous, we’ll have high’s in the low 80’s with the sun shining throughout the day. Our first stop is Athabasca Falls. Here the river is slowing carving away the hard rock, resulting in the falls, many potholes (where the water and silt eat away at the rock in a whirlpool), and the canyon walls. This falls and canyon has a lot more water than we saw yesterday in Maligne canyon. Since the sun was shining we also had a lot of rainbows from the spray of the falls. An interesting factoid about Athabasca Falls, below the falls exist about 7 different species of fish, but above the falls only the Bull Trout can be found.

Goat at Kerkeslin Goat Lick

We proceeded onward to Kerkeslin Goat Lick and sure enough, we had a group of about 6 Rocky Mountain Goats licking up the salt there and creating quite a traffic jam. Further along was Sunwapte Falls, not quite as spectacular as Athabasca. Just as the road began climbing out of the river valley, we came upon Tangle Falls, not in the main river itself, but in one of the tributaries. It was very different, less water, but a large series of falls, quite wide at the top, until unified at the bottom. We pushed to the top of Athabasca pass and then down to the Ice field visitor center. Here is one of the most accessible glaciers in North America just off the highway. Athabasca glacier is about 5 km long one of several glaciers coming down from the Columbia Ice Field on top of the mountains. It has shrunk quite a lot since the last time we were here (per-1996) and they have built a new visitor center. From here we could also see Dome Glacier, it had quite a few more bumps. You can take a ride on the glacier, but the price seemed too steep for the short excursion out onto the glacier. I guess we were spoiled by our helicopter ride to the Glaciers on Mt Cook, New Zealand.

As we continued on into Banff National Park, there were additional scenic stops. The best one was from the Bow Summit, looking North over Peyto Lake and the mountains behind it. Peyto is one of those light blue lakes because of all the sediment from the glacier stirred up in the water. The view was simply spectacular (well worth the 100 feet in elevation gain to get to the platform). We continued into Lake Louise and our campsite for the night. Lucky thing too! The gas warning light came on, just a mile short of our campsite. Which meant that I had my first $100 tank of gas, actually $109. The price was about $5.10/gallon. When we last were here nine years ago, I was outraged at the $2.60/gallon price charged here at that time. We’ll be staying for four nights at Lake Louise Hard Side Campground. It’s a beautiful campground, stretched along the Bow River. Each site is a double site with electricity and a about 20 feet of trees between each of these. The soft side campground is surrounded by an electrified bear fence to reduce bear-people interactions.

View of Peyto Lake from Bow Summit