There
are 5 National Parks in this area. Banff
and Jasper are the biggest. Jasper NP is
north of Banff NP. It is 180 miles
between the cities of Banff and Jasper.
The journey is on Icefields Parkway; a two lane road through the
forest with scenes of snow capped mountains, waterfalls, and lakes on both
sides of the road. It is a very nice 3
hour drive.
Looking down on the road we just traveled
on.
Cliff with many
waterfalls
This sign was posted nearby the above cliffs....interesting.
They
call it a Wildlife Jam and every national park and state park has it. When someone sees some wildlife on the side
of the road they stop. Sometimes they
pull over and sometimes they just stop in the middle of the road (on both
sides). So everyone has to stop. Just outside of Banff NP we came upon a
Wildlife Jam and of course we stopped to see (we had no choice). It was a big Grizzly bear, just strolling alongside
of the road, minding it’s own business, sometimes stopping to sniff the ground. The trouble was that all the two legged
viewers moved with it, along with their cars, so it took a long time to clear
the Jam. But it was okay. We were in no hurry. We’ve seen a lot of black bears but this is
our first Grizzly. It was a highlight of
our day.
We
spent 4 nights in Jasper. We visited
several sites in the park. The highlight
was visiting the Columbia Ice Fields where we boarded the Ice Explorer and
drove up onto Athabasca Glacier. We
drove through a fog bank to reach our stopping point on the glacier. But it wasn’t fog, it was snowing and brrrr was
it cold. We walked or rather slipped around
for 20 minutes taking pictures and trying to stay warm.
Dave took this
picture...
...the same time I
took this.
Mountain goats. See the baby under the mom..
The
Athabasca Glacier is 400 years old and the ice is 1,000 feet deep. It is slowly disappearing. It is predicted that in another 100 years it
will be gone as well as all the other glaciers flowing from the Columbia Ice
Fields that sits in a bowl on top of this mountain range.
Athabasca Glacer in
1919,
Athabasca
Glacier today.
We had
several sightings of wildlife. We saw Big
Horn Sheep, lots of Elk, Mountain Goats and we saw black bears a few times
crossing the road and once on the side of a hill. And we saw one Grizzly bear. We saw one Moose, running across the road in
Glacier National Park. I grabbed the
camera and got a pic of it’s butt just before it disappeared.
Big Horn Sheep
Black Bear
Moose butt
We also
saw some harmless wildlife. With those
we could get close up and personal.
We
viewed some waterfalls. This one was
quite beautiful. It had no name but it
flowed into Tangle Creek. It was just on
the side of the road.
Athabasca Falls
We
enjoyed some short hikes. The Valley
of the Five Lakes was a strenuous hike with lots of rocky steep trails. It was supposed to be a two hour hike, but
after two hours we’ve only covered a quarter of the trail, so we took the short
cut trail back. But we saw all 5 lakes. All the lakes were different depths so each
had a different hue of blue and green.
We hiked 9a and 9b
loop
Lake #5
Lake #4
Lake #1
We
viewed Maligne Lake and did another short hike at Maligne Canyon. This is a beautiful canyon with Maligne Creek
raging through it and it has many waterfalls.
You can hike the length of the canyon and cross over to the other
side. We only did the short version of
the hike but saw some beautiful sights.
Maligne Lake
We hiked the ‘blue
dots’ loop.
Looking down into the
canyon
Maligne Creek flowing
into the below waterfall
We
ended our last day with a cup of coffee and something sweet at the Fairmont
Jasper Park Lodge.
The
next day we leave the beautiful snow capped mountains, waterfalls, wildlife and
scenic roads and venture into EDMONTON, the capital city of Alberta. Here we will view a more dangerous kind of
wildlife...the two legged kind.
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