Itinerant Guest: High Point

After spending the morning at Lake Louise, I continued north to the Columbia Icefields. This was a highpoint of the trip for me, certainly in latitude, but also in an emotional sense because it was the most beautiful scenery I'd seen, and it was the furthest I would journey from my start in San Diego; I felt like I'd accomplished what I'd set out to do at this point, and the rest was just wrap up. This post recounts my excursion to the Columbia Icefields.

The Columbia Icefields lie about 100 miles north of Lake Louise. I expected to get there in less than two hours, but I didn't anticipate how often I'd want to stop to take photos. Soon after I started along the road, I said, "Those are the most beautiful mountains I've every seen. Then, five minutes further along the route, I'd say, "No, these are the most beautiful mountains I've ever seen." And it continued like that for most of the journey. Here's the view that started my series of declarations:

and then several of those that followed:

When I reached Bow Lake, I was certain that I'd finally found the best of the best:

I also marveled at how all bodies of water in this area shared the same turquoise color as Lake Louise.

As I continued further north, the mountains were, if not more beautiful, at least as interesting and progressively more snow covered:

Finally, I arrived at the visitor center for the Columbia Icefields:

and got a view of the icefields themselves:

Front and center is the star of the show, the Athabasca Glacier, and it's flanked higher to the right and the left by other glaciers. The visitor center sold a variety of tour packages ranging from walking on a glass bridge over a small glacier to a package including a bus trip out onto the glacier itself. But the least expensive tour that got you onto the glacier was over $100, and that just seemed unreasonable to me. Thankfully, it's possible to drive close to the foot of the glacier and trek the rest of the way yourself, and that's what I did.

Here's a shot of the road leading to the glacier:

Here's the trail you take from the parking lot up the moraine (the pile of rocks left behind as the glacier has receded) to get to the foot of the glacier:

It does't look all that steep until you're on it, but it was quite an exertion to get to the top. Along the way, you pass markers recording how far the glacier extended in past years:

In 1927, it was almost all the way out to the road. When you reach the top of the moraine, you realize you've still got quite a way to go to the glacier:

This image is notable because the tiny human figures at the lower left give a sense of the scale involved. To get to the foot of the glacier rom the top of the moraine, you have to climb down again over a very half-hearted barrier:

cross a very rocky field and several small streams of glacial runoff, but I couldn't resist. I finally got to stand on the glacier:

No, I was not taking any chance that a crevasse would swallow me whole; there are only about three inches of ice under my feet, but that was enough. Some people ventured several hundred yards up the glacier without a guide, but that just struck me as foolhardy:

Speaking of foolhardy, one guy rode his mountain bike up the very steep moraine trail, and then zoomed back down again, wearing an action cam mounted on his head. That's him in the center of the trail as he sped past me:

Thoughtfully, he had a little ting-a-ling bell to warn you he was barreling down.

Just as I got back to the van, a very light snow began to fall. As I traveled the highway back along the way I came, the snow became progressively heavier. If I had rushed to the glacier and waited for all those great mountain shots on the return trip, this is what I would have gotten: