7 Sept 2017
Little River Rest Area outside of McBride BC
After a nice quiet night at our boondock site, complete with cut grass, picnic tables, glacier fed river, and new front tire, we departed at 0900. We headed east on Hwy 16 to Jasper Provincial Park and the town of Jasper. Uneventful short trip of 125km, but traveled thru a lot of smoke from forest fires. We arrive at Jasper, and discover it is a neat “alpine” like village, except full of tourists and a lot of RVs. We are towing, so we are too big to stop in town.
Many shops and eateries, and we decided to get fuel and keep on moving towards the Columbia Icefields. We want to walk on a huge glacier and can’t wait to get there.
We turned south on the Icefields Parkway heading towards Banff. The first 50 kms we were on a newly paved road, holy cow, it was awesome. There are many campgrounds in this huge park. The next 70km was a terrible, rib rattling road, who woulda thought..
The Icefields Parkway is known as the most scenic drive in North America. Well, we can only imagine the beauty that lies beyond, as the forest fire smoke is just above tree top level, and all we can see is the shadowy outline of the jagged Canadian Rockies. We are thankful we are not close to any fires. What we did see, along side of the road, galloping in the opposite lane was a small herd of female big-horn sheep. That was pretty kool……
We arrived at the Glacier Interpretative Center and parked the BFT and house in a big rv parking lot, right across the street from the Athabasca Glacier. The massive six kilometer long and one kilometer wide tonque of the Athabasca Glacier flows to within walking distance of the Icefields Parkway. They allow RVers to overnight (dry), so this is home for tonight with another terrific view!
The glacier, is surrounded by huge mountains over 11000 feet tall, if only we could see them! The smoke from the fires, has all but alleviated the sun, which means a low solar charge today for our house.
We purchased our tickets for the Glacier Adventure, but while we waited we grabbed a burger, and watched a Canadian Park movie about the Glacier. Probably the worst info movie I had ever seen.
We boarded a bus, that took us up to the edge of the Athabasca glacier where we then boarded a sno-bus. This sno-bus (valued at $1.4 million each) was driven by a young french girl from Quebec. The sno-bus has six 5-foot tall tires, that are inflated to 12 psi so they can grip the ice.
There are only 24 of these buses built, and 23 of them are here at the glacier, the 24th is in Antarctica, at the weather research station. The sno-bus, travels at a break neck speed of about 10 mph as it takes us down a 32 degree dirt hill to reach the surface of the glacier. They re-carve and grade a new road to the middle of the glacier every year, because the glacier moves up to 20 meters a year. The Icefields above “feeds” the Athabasca glacier (one of eight major glaciers of this icefield) by pushing its ice into the glacier.
We get off the sno-bus and walk onto the GLACIER. It is windy and much colder, and the sun is just a dim orange ball through the dense smoke above the shadow of the mountains.
The Columbia Icefield was formed during the Great Glaciation period (238,000 to 126,000 BC) and it is STILL here ! It covers 125 square miles and is the largest non-polar icefield in the world! The Athabasca glacier where we were standing is 850 feet thick, Pretty kool…WOW……
We walked round the designated area of the glacier, taking pictures, touching the ice, looking around in awe of the sheer size of this. We see an small glacier streaam and fill an empty water bottle with glacier water. After we both chugged some 200 year old fresh water, we continued to be amazed, at what mother nature provides. What we are seeing represents only 2% of this total icefield. WOW…
After our allotted glacier time was up, we carefully walk back to the sno-bus across the glacier ice without falling. The sno-bus slowly traverses the glacier and up the 32 degree hill, we transfer to a bus and get back to the Glacier Info Center. We walked back to the house, hit a few buttons to level, open the slides, and activate the directv satellite dish on the roof. Life is good…..