Icefields Parkway in Alberta Canada

Tuesday, June 6, 2017

Today our goal is to drive the complete Icefields Parkway.  National Geographic toutes it as "One of the World's most spectacular driving tours".  This drive is 144 miles long and goes through both Banff National Park and Jasper National Park.  The landscape is breath-taking.  I took 134 pictures today and at least 10 videos.  You are lucky, I'm only including 33 pictures and 5 videos, so be prepared for a beautiful journey.

We drove from Lake Louise north to Jasper so the pictures will be in that order.  I will only have descriptions occasionally.
Here we go....

This video was taken because you couldn't fit everything into one picture.  Lake Herbert was so still the reflections looked like they were in a mirror.

We did get to see this big black bear foraging on the side of the road.  
 

 Again I could not get everything in one picture so I took a video of Bow Lake.  As you can tell it still has lots of ice on it.

For a while the road ran along the north Saskatchewan River. 
 

Notice how deep the snow is on that peak.

Above and below are pictures of Mistaya Canyon created by the Mistaya River. 

The flow was so magnificent that I had to put a video of the Mistaya River in also.  This is a well marked site just off the Icefields Parkway.

This is called the Weeping Wall.  There are lots of waterfalls created by the melting snows.  This wall happens to have several in one place.

I thought this showed it well; frequently how far the waters fall.
 

This is looking southward.  You can see the drive we just made and the Athabasca River.
 

We've made it to the Columbia Icefields.  The following pictures and one video show only a few fingers of the 244 miles of glacier.  We chose not to ride onto the icefields.

Above is a small part of a glacier.  Below is a close up of that glacier showing the ice.  It was dark blue in color.

This glacier looks like an amphitheater. 

This is what we saw from the Columbia Icefields Discovery Centre.

 At the Discovery Center you could purchase tickets to go out on the Sky Walk.  Neither of us had any desire to do that.  I did get this picture.  Sort of like the walk out over the Grand Canyon in Arizona.

 Some of the waters flowing were constant enough they were named.  This one was named Tangle Creek.

We were amazed at the depth of the snow still on the mountains in June.

Like I said earlier, there were many gorgeous waterfalls all along our drive.
 

We are getting closer to Jasper.  This is still the Athabasca River.  The picture doesn't show the color of the river very well.  It is a pale jade due to the minerals.  Most of the rivers and waterfalls are that color. 
 

 We made it to our campground.  This is Wapiti Campground in the Jasper National Forest.  We will be boondocking for 2 nights here.  We are enjoying a campfire tonight.  Sunset is not until 10:12pm.  I'm sitting outside working on this post and it is 10:07 pm now and not dark.  What a wonderful way to end such a glorious day!