 06:48:32 I am up at the crack of dawn to take a walk down by the river to see if I can spot any wildlife. I am also interested in the weather as well, of course, but it's still early and cold in the mountains so we won't really know whether it's going to clear for a while yet. But in the distance a tantalising glimpse of a snowy mountain peak reminds me that good weather for today would be really nice, otherwise we won't see much. I hope our faith in the Nerd Schedule is well founded. Please don't let us down Nerd Schedule!  07:11:21 The only wildlife I see this morning is a jittery little squirrel.  09:54:21 After a light breakfast we're on the road again. Still very cloudy. Very very sad... please clear up. Come on sun! Burn off those clouds!  10:04:07 Ten minutes later the situation has improved remarkably, but the clouds still cling to the mountain peaks and obscure the view.  10:04:41  10:04:55  10:07:27 I guess I couldn't make my mind up about which picture I wanted to take from this spot.  10:13:22 The mountains loom magnificently in the distance.  10:21:55 Our first stop of the day is a lookout on the road to our first destination, Maligne Lake.  A bit of satellite image orientation first. I've marked the location of our cabin as well as the town of Jasper and Maligne Lake, where we are now heading. Later we'll retrace the same route back from Maligne Lake, past Jasper and our cabin to head South along the Icefield Parkway.  10:28:40 Ok, the weather is really clearing up now. As long as it stays this way the sun will definitely evaporate the last of those lingering clouds.  10:39:30 The sun is actually perhaps a bit too bright, in fact. I am trying to get artistic lens flare, but instead it's just plain old normal lens flare.  10:40:27 Check out the contrast of colours in this photo. The snowy peaks of the mountains are absolutely blindingly white. It takes me a while to realise it, but finally it occurs to me that there has been a significant amount of snow at the higher altitudes. Normally this time of year this mountain would be mostly rock showing, instead it's just a massive wall of white. Notice how far down the tree line the snow reaches. What this means is that yet again we seem to be having absolutely the best possible luck with the weather. Not only is it clear today, when we need it to be, but the preceding days were so cold and last night so much so that it snowed higher up and we're left with these dazzlingly white peaks all around us.  10:41:31 I must admit that a part of me is a little sick of the sun. We've had so much of it on this trip, after all, and I am no fan of sunlight. But I'd rather be sun-baked and enjoying mountain views than shaded and looking at rainclouds.  10:41:34 Just in case you needed a reminder of the altitude we're at here... you can see in this photo that the so-called "tree line" is not far above us. It's also interesting to see how abruptly the vegetation drops off.  10:41:38 The fresh snow is just unbelievable, isn't it? Days like today are rare.  10:41:41  10:42:02  10:43:54  10:46:46  10:53:57 Is it wrong of me to resent these lingering clouds for obscuring our view?  10:54:58  11:00:49 It's not quite apparent, but there's a bit of snow along the side of the road here. We're high enough up here that there was snow here overnight.  11:23:40 Which brings us to Maligne Lake. You can orient yourself using this helpful 3D model. We are at the close end, and way at the far end is the famous Spirit Island... which we won't be going to because the boat ride there takes like two hours and costs a bunch of money. So we don't have a picture of that for you, but check it out at Wikipedia, if you want:  11:23:53  11:24:52 Not many people renting canoes today...  11:27:31 Some guy saw me take this picture and was inspired enough to hike through the grass after me and take the same shot himself.  11:37:11 Back to the car again we retrace our steps and head back toward Jasper once again.  11:40:08  11:49:07 Here's that snow I was talking about earlier, more obvious in this picture. A few hours ago it was snowing here. Cool!  11:50:39  11:50:58  11:52:04  11:55:02 The views are different in the opposite direction.  11:57:27  12:00:40  12:15:42 Sit back and enjoy the views as we turn South along the Icefields Parkway and head for our next stop... the Athabasca Falls.  12:29:34  12:38:14  12:38:55  12:41:22  12:43:50  12:56:39 The water crashing over the edge here is the Athabasca River, which continues to flow North from here to where our cabin was last night.  12:56:57  12:57:31  12:59:00 If you look closely at this you can see a formation known as a pothole. This is formed by sediment and water that swirls in an eddy which eventually carves out a circular formation in the rock, slowly eroding downward through the rock over thousands and thousands of years.  12:59:26  12:59:41  13:00:07  13:03:55 A popular pastime here is white-water rafting, many of which start just down river from here.  13:04:23 You can see how the river has cut its way through the rock over the ages.  13:10:56  13:16:49  13:19:49 This is a nice view of the Athabasca River above the falls.  13:20:57 Continuing on our way again down the Icefields Parkway.  13:22:31  13:24:06  13:30:04  13:36:05  13:38:54 Something about these mountains reminds me of Oreo Cookie Ice Cream.  13:44:26 I really liked this view of the sharp peaks sloping up off to our left. I should have got a picture earlier though.  14:01:28  14:08:51 A lone crow at high altitude.  14:10:51 I have to admit that I didn't think that I'd encounter snow on this trip, but there it is.  14:11:09  14:11:15 Check out the patch of yellow trees in the sea of white and green.  14:14:51 That crow again...  14:19:44 Check out the weather! It's unbelievably clear today.  14:20:10 The little Toyota Matrix rental car is holding up well up here.  14:23:22 We are really reaching icy parts now. Up ahead are the giant glaciers and sheets of ice and snow that form the Columbia Icefield.  14:24:40 We've left the world of Indian Summer behind us now and are entering a world of ice.  14:42:58 From the so-called Icefield Centre we have a nice view across the Icefields Parkway to the Athabasca Glacier. This glacier is one of eight major glaciers that are fed by the Columbia Icefield, which is a gigantic accumulation of snow and ice located just above where we see the glacier running down between the two mountains. Also on the opposite side of the highway we can see the parking lot from where you can walk up to the front edge of the glacier, but that's not where we're headed today... we're headed right out ONTO the glacier.  Perhaps we need a satellite orientation so we know what we're talking about? On this image we can see the extent of the Columbia Icefield (covering 350 square kilometres) and various glaciers that it feeds, pushing the ice down in the "cracks" between the mountain peaks. The tip of the arrow points to the location of the Icefield Centre from where the previous photo was taken.  15:00:27 The Columbia Icefield has been a tourist attraction for more than a hundred years and has utilised various means of transporting people from the base up out onto the surface of the glacier, including: horses, snowmobiles, modified Ford trucks, and Greyhound busses (pictured here).  15:01:06 Since 1981, however, visitors are transported in style using specially designed "SnoCoaches".  15:08:31  15:09:52 Looking back out toward the Icefield Centre (barely visible on the opposite side of the highway) along the so-called Lateral Moraine (a pile of rocks built up along the sides of a glacier valley carried and placed there by the expansion, melting and contraction of the glacier).  15:21:34 This picture is not only really cool, but also illustrates the other main kind of glacier type - the "hanging" glacier. Some glaciers (like the Athabasca Glacier) are fed by fields of ice, formed by snowfall in high altitude basins like the Columbia Icefield. But other glaciers stand alone and form on their own from accumulated snowfall and "hang" from the peaks of mountains, like this one.  15:23:45 A wisp of a cloud as damp air passes over the icy peak. This is the only cloud in the sky at the moment. And, according to the drivers, this is the most perfect day imaginable, with almost no wind (almost unheard of in the mountains at high altitude), clear skies above and it's even warm outside. And all this just today, as it has been raining and overcast for weeks previously.  15:24:13 Ice Explorer #46 drops us off on the surface of the Athabasca Glacier.  15:25:50  15:26:01 Glaciers are dangerous places to be. Surface snow and ice conceal dangerous crevasses in the glacier through which hikers can fall (that's why they tie themselves together, duh). The blue pylon at the bottom right marks the limit of the safe area for walking. Some holes in the glacier are stable, such as the holes formed by liquid water that bores caves down through the ice that are favourite exploration spots for ice cave climbers and divers.  15:28:18  15:28:27  15:31:44 Another pair of SnoCoaches on their way to and from the glacier.  15:31:56  15:33:14 I am often asked if my feet are cold when I wear them in slightly cold or wet weather, usually in weather that only complete girls would have cold feet and not proper human beings. I wear shorts in -40 degrees, let's not forget. I can handle a bit of snow and ice in sandals, I assure you, and no my feet are not cold. This is a Sarah McLachlan lyric, actually, from Building a Mystery: "You wear sandals in the snow, and a smile that won't wash away..."  15:37:18  15:37:58  15:38:26  15:46:00 This glacier above us was so unbelievable that I guess I just had to keep taking pictures of it over and over again.  15:50:44  15:54:35 I have no idea who this dude is, although he kind of looks like my friend Kent. But for this picture I just wanted to show how steep the climb back up from the glacier to the top of the Lateral Moraine was.  16:16:45 The sun is so bright on the snow that we're flirting with snowblindness out here.  16:16:47 One last view back toward the Athabasca Glacier. If you look really closely you can see the SnoCoaches crawling across the ice out onto the glacier. Each SnoCoach passes through pools of melted glacier water before climbing out onto the ice surface. This washes any dirt and stones from the tyres and explains why there isn't a dirty brown track across the glacier. But in addition to aesthetics there is actually a good environmental reason for washing off the tyres: if dark coloured material were left on the surface of the ice it would soak up the heat of the sun and accelerate the melting of the glacier, which is already receding alarmingly as it is. At the bottom of the glacier is a lake formed by the melting ice. In addition to water the glacier provides tons of sediment from the force of scraping against the rock. This sediment is carried by the water down to the lakes below, which gradually fill up because of the accumulation. This lake, for example, will probably cease to exist in the next fifty years because it will have filled up with sediment.  16:30:00 Continuing on our way again down along the Icefields Parkway.  16:31:01 I had to scramble to get my camera out for this one... the view of this mountain ahead was amazing. I missed it though....  16:33:49 Oh, this is better. This was really amazing, somehow.  16:36:23  16:40:15 We're descending now down out of the higher altitudes and down into a more temperate climate zone.  16:48:44 Oh my god... I hate to get sentimental (and have refrained not only today, but during this entire vacation) but just look at this.... it's so beautiful that it makes you almost weep.  17:24:54  17:30:18 The photos from the past 45 minutes or so have been a bit sparse. This is because we've reached a section of the Icefields Parkway that we passed through last year (in the opposite direction) on the way to Edmonton and I didn't want to completely duplicate all those many pictures I took last year. This lake, for example, was photographed several times by me last year. The difference then was that the sun was at an entirely different angle and the water was INCREDIBLY blue. Anyone remember that?  17:32:01 This year, however, the sun is directly in front of us and makes for a lot of lens flare, none of it cool.  17:32:22  17:32:30  17:33:50  17:53:11 Back on the road again...  17:56:47 Another lake that was blindingly turquoise last year, but almost plain old blue this year due to the angle of the sun.  17:56:53 More non-cool, non-artistic lens flare.  17:57:27 I considered staying at this lodge here on Bow Lake. It is the Num Ti Jah Lodge (www.num-ti-jah.com) and offers a spectacular view across the lake. But I wanted to get a bit more driving out of the way before going to bed tonight because we have a fairly long drive ahead of us tomorrow as well, so I decided to stay a bit further along the road from here.  17:57:39  18:00:58  18:06:56  19:01:50 And so we reach the end of the Icefields Parkway. We're still in the Rocky Mountains from here on, but it's not the same. The Icefields Parkway is absolutely spectacular and makes the majesty of the regular Rocky Mountains seem ordinary somehow.  19:25:29 And so we reach our home for the night, another cozy little cabin in the woods.  19:26:49 Some bunnies scurry around outside the cabin, as seen through the window.  19:31:56 A cute little stove for keeping warm.  19:43:52 We decide to drive into Banff for dinner. Along the way the sun begins to set and the moon rises over the mountain peaks.  20:01:19 A view back toward Vancouver and the sunset.  20:01:24  20:01:39 This is a familiar view to anyone who knows the #1 Trans Canada Highway between Banff and Lake Louise. (I think I said this exact thing LAST year!) But there's more snow than there should be at this time of year, thanks to the recent snowfall.  20:21:21 These parts of the Rocky Mountains are full of hot springs to which people flock to soak in the naturally heated waters and cure themselves of whatever ails them.  20:22:11 The hot spring water runs down out of the rock and leaves a overpowering smell of sulphur.  And so we come to the end of another day, this one with a lot of driving. I've marked some relevant locations on this satellite image, but it's a bit too zoomed out to be of much use, isn't it?  Maybe a map would be better? Basically, aside from the detour to Maligne Lake this morning, we've driven from Jasper to Banff along Highway #93 (the Icefields Parkway).  22:03:30 After dinner in Banff we must drive back through the mountains on a secondary road to reach our cabin. We have to take it slow because it's that time of day when the wildlife is out in full force. We see two bears (making our daily total of bear sightings three) and surprisingly a wolf crouched at the side of the road as well. This drive is also a little freaky as well. It's a bit too much like a horror movie or something. I hope the car doesn't break down because it's always the man who gets killed first. Today's Travel Information Jasper and Banff National Parks www.parkscanada.com Maligne Lake www.malignelake.com Columbia Icefield www.columbiaicefield.com SnoCoach trip up onto the Athabasca Glacier = $31.95 Johnston Canyon Resort www.johnstoncanyon.com Box 875 Banff AB (403) 762-2971 2 Person Cottage = $139 
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