The Icefields Parkway
29 June 2018
Brrrrrrr.
This morning started out lovely. A quietish campground and dry weather; a calm start to the day. I woke up, packed up all of the gear in my tent, tossed it out the door, got out and started taking down the tent - then it started raining. Welcome to the mountains!
It also got colder, and so packing my freshly dampened gear led to some pretty icy hands. Once I got everything loaded up, I hopped on the bike and headed for Lake Louise since I needed fuel before I continued north. My hands only got colder as I rode, there just wasn’t enough blood flowing to warm them back up. I stopped, grabbed two of the Clik Heat packs I keep in my toolbox, started them, stuffed them in the back of my gloves and kept going. That kept my hands warm enough to get me to the Lake Louise Visitors center.
Once again, it was a circus. I first stopped in at one of the little cafes to get a cup of coffee, but they were out of drip coffee when I got to the register so they concocted something using the espresso machine. It was pretty tasty and most importantly; it was warm. My next stop was the visitors center, where they had the weather forecast displayed on a TV.
Awesome
The weather wasn’t promising and I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do. They sort of had wifi there, so I hung around, uploaded a blog post, checked my email and enjoyed my coffee. When I was ready to go, it was getting close to lunch and I hadn’t had breakfast yet. I stepped in to the other cafe at the mall and they prepared me a Rocky Mountain Pizza Wrap. It was amazing, and warm, and had lots of pepperoni. It was the perfect lunch for a day like that.
My last stop was the gas station, which was overrun with RV’s. The way the fuel island is arranged there is a single diesel pump between two gasoline pumps, so one diesel RV can get fuel or two cars. Or, as I found out, one diesel RV and one motorcycle. I watched the lineup and right after someone pulled in with their pickup and 5th wheel, I pulled in right in front of him and got gas. Another point for being small!
Fully loaded up and ready to roll, I hit the road and went north on the Icefields Parkway. As the weather report predicted, it was cloudy. I couldn’t see the tops of most of the mountains around me and the road was a little damp in places. Most of the trip was a mix of stopping to look at lakes and overlooks and occasionally getting stuck behind a tour bus and its cloud of spray. It was a pretty nice day to be out, but not the best day to explore the parkway on a bike.
Yep, its that blue. Apparently this comes from tiny particles ground up like flour by the glaciers
By the time I arrived at Athabasca Glacier, the weather had cleared up a little and it had gotten a little warmer. The tops of the mountains were visible and the sun was starting to shine. The first thing I found when coming up from the south was the Icefields Discovery Center. The parking lot was 100% full and they were directing vehicles to other more distant parking places. That didn’t seem like a place I wanted to be at. Instead, I kept going to the parking lot at the base of the glacier. There is a walking trail there that leads you up almost to the foot of the glacier, but they warn you pretty severely not to climb onto the glacier. The glacier is full of cracks and crevasses that people can fall into, and when that happens rescues aren’t usually successful.
Canadian signs still have the best drawings
Scrapes from the retreating Glacier
There is a red bus in this picture, for scale
After hiking up to the foot of the glacier, or as close as they let you get, I stood around a bit and watched. There is a side road that a tour company runs buses up and down, and at the top of that road, they transfer the people onto one of their big red ice explorer buses for a trip out onto the ice. There’s also a company that leads walking tours onto the ice, presumably with someone who knows what they’re doing and won’t let you fall into a crevass. I think next time I’ll opt for the walking tour.
Back at the parking lot, it looked like the tourist info center for the glacier was still a madhouse, so I kept on going up the parkway. It continued to be both beautiful and occasionally rainy. Once I reached Jasper I wasn’t in much of a mood to explore town, it felt quite a bit like Banff, but they did have this enormous railroad locomotive sitting out front. Each of the drivers was 6’ 1” tall, or roughly as tall as me. I can only imagine what that must have been like to see going down the rails.
After checking out the dining options in Jasper and not seeing anything I was interested in, I continued down the road to Hinton. On the way there we had to wait in line for the cleanup of an accident. I didn’t get a picture, but the burn marks all over the side of the hill and down to the bank of the river, along with the two halves of the fuel delivery truck they were stacking together gave me a pretty good idea of what might have happened. Further on, it rained, as usual. But the pictures were great!
Once in Hinton, I grabbed a campsite at the city operated park, had a delicious burger at the Dairy Queen, ventured into Canadian Tire for the first time, and changed the rear brake pads on my bike. One of the pads was completely gone, while the other still had a fair amount of material left. It probably got oil on it or something, or maybe chain lube. Or mud.
