Glaciers!

We set out in the morning from Lake Louise Campground headed for Jasper National Park via the Icefield Parkway.

Rowes' Sea Breeze leads the way to Jasper

Marks' Excel on the Icefield Parkway (photo by Nanci Rowe)

As planned, we stopped at the Columbia Icefield, and eight of the group took an excursion on the Brewster Ice Explorer to walk on the Athabasca Glacier. First the shuttle bus took us to a rendezvous at the lateral moraine of the glacier, where we boarded our Ice Explorer for a trip up the glacier. When we arrived at the turnaround point, our driver told us we had 20 minutes to walk on the glacier before boarding for the return trip. We spent the first several minutes getting the driver to take photos of our group.

Brewster Ice Explorer whisked us to the Athabasca Glacier (photo by Nanci Rowe)

Ken and Lee standing on glacial ice

Then we had some time to walk around on the glacier. Looking up we could see two other named glaciers, as well as some small unnamed glaciers. Under our feet was blue glacial ice, hundreds of feet thick. The ice was not pure white or blue as I had expected, but instead sprinkled with black particles, brought to the glacier by the snowflakes which had picked them up in the atmosphere from carbon soot. Some of it actually looked a lot like the slush piled up on the roadsides in Cleveland by snowplows. We had to stay inside a circle of blue cones, for our own safety and to protect the glacier. A fast running stream carried glacial meltwater across the glacier at our feet.

In the evening I joined a group going to check out a trail by a beaver pond. We saw a large beaver making its way from a lodge to the shore, evidently collecting food. Some of the group walked around the Cottonwood Slough and saw three more beavers. Mike and Judy and Wes and Jenske drove towards Patricia Lake and saw a tan colored grizzly bear and some elk. Marlyn, Ed, and I continued on the path around the Slough and along the creek, but after a while, when we hadn’t come to the turning point of the trail, we decided to backtrack and head back to camp.