Day 23: The Icefields Parkway

We leave pretty early in the morning and take Alberta Highway 93 north, which is better known as the Icefields Parkway. This road begins in Banff NP and continues into Jasper NP and is strictly used by national park pass holders. It's 142 miles long with only one gas station along the way. The day is very cloudy and drizzly, so we won't get to see it at its best. It still remains quite impressive.

 

We stop at every lookout. There is a succession of lakes colored from glacier blue to emerald green, glaciers hanging to the sides of mountains, and snow sprinkled peaks. After pulling into a parking spot at Peyto Lake, we are in the car getting ready when we feel a big smack! The RV that was backing out of its parking spot just hit us. Yellow honks, but several seconds pass before it to moves forward and releases Bertha from her tipping position. We get out to see the damage and greet the elderly German man and his wife that just hit us. Their back bumper hit our left side close to the generator, which left some scratches on its door frame and a dent close to the driver's door. It's not too bad. It's not like the RV is new... The German couple offers us $50, and we accept. Deal. After feeling a little shook up, we finally walk towards Peyto Lake. It starts to rain, so Red runs back to the car but Yellow waits in the rain for the perfect moment when the sun will illuminate the lake.

And we're back on the road. As we go up to Sunwapta Pass, the view gets more and more spectacular. We can see the edges of the Columbia Icefield. This icefield is a gigantic layer ice that is held up between eleven different peaks and feeds many glaciers. It's like a water tower for North America, as it feeds major rivers (like the Columbia River) going to the Pacific, Arctic, Hudson Bay, and Atlantic. Some areas are thicker than the height of the Eiffel Tower. And it's a big tourist hotspot, especially the Athabasca Glacier which is one of the most accessible glaciers in the world. We can see it from the car. We can touch it after hiking for 1.5 km. One hundred and fifty years ago, we wouldn't have been able to use this road. However, two-thirds of the glacier have melted since then.

 

 

We park the RV and decide to bike around despite the cold, which doesn't turn out to be a good idea. In fact, after a couple minutes it starts to rain ice. We still make it up to the finger of the glacier and wait for the clouds to pass. They don't. We go back to the RV and wait around a bit more to see if it will clear up at all. It does just a little bit, but we don't want to spend the night here, so we keep driving north and find camping at Honeymoon Lake. We eat dinner and get into our sleeping bags pretty early due to the dropping temperature.