The Columbia Icefields

The Columbia Icefields

How is it possible that each day here in Banff could be better than the one before? We drove up the magnificent Icefields Parkway to the Columbia Icefields and actually walked on a glacier. . !

How cool is that?

No. . .

How freakin’, blow your mind, absolutely out of this world, amazing is that?

I was giddy the entire time. And I don’t think it could all be blamed on the high altitude nor the icy wind blowing off the glacier.

I’ll try to make some sense out of these pictures. I have shots of the glacial surface that we walked on. Near the edges, are shots of melt water running off the glacier and down to the lake it feeds. My middle son had a water bottle that he filled with glacial run-off. We were told we could drink it; it was that pure. Walking on the glacier was tricky. The surface was slippery and uneven. One had to be careful.

The bus we rode to get onto the glacier was no ordinary bus, but a specially designed snow coach. They are able to drive on gravel roads with a 17% grade and the surface of the icy glacier. One coach is being used by the US government in Antarctica. The other twenty-two are here. The tires are four feet tall.

The glacier had mountains on either side and of one these, Snow Dome, has the distinct honor of being the peak of a triple continental divide. From this mountain, the water runoff flows to three different oceans, the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Arctic.

One of the pictures I took from the visitor’s center shows a snow coach out onto the glacier so you can see where we were when I took the pictures on the glacier.