2010 Canadian Parks Tour - Day #3 The Icefields Centre

The Icefield Centre - lots of great information and touring options available here:




The Triumph Speed Triple - so cool it may save the glaciers from global warming!


This is as close to the Athabasca Glacier as they want you to get, these days!


This is part of how glaciers carve mountains: by dragging embedded rocks across stationary rocks:


There's a snow bus with big balloon tires that takes tourists safely onto the glacier.


Others hike up until they're nearly at the toe of the glacier:


Here's a decent overall shot of the Athabasca Glacier. If you look closely, you can get an idea of scale by finding the guided party hiking, up on the left:


LOTS of safety warnings there. Understandable, as crevasses are often invisible. Death by hypothermia while wedged into a TIGHT slot in a block of ice has to be a horrible way to go.


The glacier is melting faster these days. This melt-water stream was lively around 10 am. They mention it as another hazard so maybe it becomes turbulent enough to be dangerous, later in the day.

2010 Canadian Parks Tour - Day #2-3 continuing through the Icefields Parkway

Here's shots taken from the Icefields Parkway. The beauty is really quite breathtaking:


The Crowfoot Glacier:


Continuing along...



With a lot of these geological formations, you can really get a feel for how dynamic, if slow, their forces causing their creation was:






Finally reached the Columbia Icefield!

2010 Canadian Parks Tour - Day #2 continuing through Yoho

Here's a time capsule from the Rogers Pass information site and the information site itself:

Continuing on towards Yoho Park, some local wildlife, bighorn sheep, turned out to observe:


Yoho is the park I was most looking forward to visiting last year and it was deeply cool to finally reach the park this year.

Here's are some shots approaching and by Emerald lake:


Pressing on towards Field, a town in the heart of Yoho:


I stopped at the visitors centre near Field, look forward to returning when time allows. Next, I pressed on towards Takakkaw Falls. The first shot below is near a viewpoint for the Spiral Tunnels, which made sending railroads through Kicking Horse Pass less, well, lethal.


Here is one of the switchbacks, which make driving up the hill a task vehicles hauling trailers shouldn't attempt. Note how the road's surface has been battered by falling rocks. Not a place to be during bad weather!






Takakkaw Falls. 1260 ft/384 meters high, vs. Niagara Falls' 167 feet / 52 meters. The treat that hikers get and vehicle tourers don't is a look at the icefield on top whose melt water feeds that waterfall. The word Takakkaw comes from the Cree word for magnificent. I can only think that the Cree are a people given to understatement!

Day 2 was a big day, as I spent a little time in Lake Louise later in the day before pressing on into the Icefields Parkway. More will be posted later...

2010 Canadian Parks Tour - Day #2 Revelstoke and Glacier parks

Revelstoke by day. I simply can't overemphasize how cool a town Revelstoke seems to be...it reminds me a lot of the bit I saw of Nelson last year. Everyone I spoke with, at the town's Information Centre and the Parks Office was friendly and enthusiastic about helping me find the cool stuff to see, in the area. And on this second day, I was really wishing that my plan for the trip allowed me to stay here an extra day or two and explore the Revelstoke and Glacier parks.



Arriving at Revelstoke National Park, proper.



And then Glacier National Park. Avalanches are VERY serious business here, with massive protected shelters covering large portions of the highway.



Rogers Pass in Glacier National Park

A shot from the information Centre that's being rebuilt now.



And what appears to be a painting from almost the same perspective in "At the Rogers Pass", a painting by John A. Fraser (1886).



By this time I was thinking, if these smaller parks are this gorgeous and impressive, what are Yoho, Banff and Jasper going to be like?