Come Go With Us...: Columbia Ice Fields and Athabasca Glacier, Jasper National Park

Saturday, June 30, 2018

Day 16
233 Miles

On Saturday, June 30, Daisy and I traveled through Jasper National Park and spent some time at the Columbia Icefield. We had the new experiences of walking on a glacier and a skywalk suspended above a deep valley. Our style of travel is not for the faint of heart!

The Icefield Centre was the staging point for our adventures and had many informative exhibits. The Columbia Icefield is the largest one in the Rocky Mountains. It straddles the border of British Columbia and Alberta and covers about 165 square kilometers.

This photo below shows our truck camper in the parking lot with Mt. Snow Dome and the Dome Glacier in the background. Mt. Snow Dome (3,456 meters/11,339 feet) has the distinction of being a triple continental divide, with water from it flowing into the Pacific, Atlantic, and Arctic Oceans.

Daisy took this photo of an exhibit in the Icefield Center to show what we could view—if the day had sunny. Glaciers in the Rocky Mountains are melting, and in recent years the rate has quickened. The Athabasca Glacier that we walked on is losing at least 5 meters each year from the surface and has lost more than half its volume in the last 125 years. Many researchers hypothesize that it will be gone by 2100.

Of course we had to have a photo with the Athabasca Glacier in the background! To illustrate the decrease in the Glacier, in 1917 its edge was at ground level near the observation platform where we were standing. Now it is about 1,500 meters away.

We rode in standard buses to the staging point at the base of the Athabasca Glacier, then transferred to an Ice Explorer for the trip onto the surface of the Glacier.

We encountered others who chose to hike to the glacier and beyond.

The Brewster tour company has 26 of these powerful vehicles at Athabasca, and the only two others in the world are currently used in research in Antarctica. They are powered by Mercedes Benz engines and each one cost $1.3 million!

You can tell from this photo the height and width of the tires! They are inflated to only 14 psi for the best traction on the ice.

I took this photo of Daisy on the Glacier, with the upper part in the mountains behind me. Glacial ice forms where more snow falls in winter than melts in summer. As snow accumulates, it becomes compacted under its own weight, turning to dense ice. Over time, gravity makes this ice flow slowly downhill like a river of taffy.

If you are facing the Athabasca Glacier, you see the hanging Andromeda Glacier to the left, and it is shown in this photo.

When the Ice Explorers cross the moraine of rock and soil which was formed from the pressure of the sides of the glacier, they descend down this 32% grade. We were thankful for an effective engine braking system!

I wanted my photo with two of the young women who drive the Ice Explorers, and the one on the right was our driver. She had recently received her bachelor’s degree in communications and said that her mother asked her when she was going to get a “real job.” Her response: “I’m doing OK. I drive a $1.3 million Mercedes.”

Our driver took this photo of us waving goodbye to the Glacier. She said the temperature that day was about 4 degrees Celsius (39 degrees Fahrenheit) and there was a steady wind, so we were glad we had dressed warmly.

Glaciers are good indicators of how the climate is changing. As the climate warms, the ice melts and the glacier retreats as it gets smaller. The Athabasca that we ventured on is on its way to being a memory and is predicted to disappear by 2100.

The next part of our adventure involved taking a bus to the Glacier Skywalk, which was designed by the same company as the Grand Canyon Skywalk. This marvel of engineering design has 1.4-inch thick tempered-glass panels and 815,710 pounds of steel and is capable of carrying the weight of 2 Boeing 747s! That is a good thing because it hangs out over the gorge. The picture on the right below I borrowed from the onsite display.

You can see the edge of the Skywalk in the upper left side of this photo. The observation platform is 918 feet above the Sunwapta Valley.

This photo shows looking down at Daisy’s feet, with the rock cliff below and the river visible through the side panel in the upper right.

Thank goodness neither Daisy nor I are bothered too much by heights!

From this view, you can see some of the mountains in the background.

That is me in the tan jacket at the center of the curve of the Skywalk, and the river is at the bottom of the photo. It was a very impressive structure and we enjoyed the opportunity to have this experience.

After leaving the Columbia Icefield in the Jasper National Park, we drove south and then west into British Columbia and the Yoho National Park to our campground for the next two nights in Golden, BC.

We came back this way a little the next day to go to Lake Louise. The mountain scenery is spectacular. At this point, we had seen elk, deer, black bears, and mountain sheep, none in great numbers.

We arrived at the Whispering Spruce Campground at 5:30 pm. We stopped first at a visitor center to gather more information to plan our next day’s adventure. There we found out that the next day would be a national holiday called Canada Day, so we were lucky we were able to find a campsite.