Jasper, AB to Lake Louise, AB

Day 34: Sun 24 Aug: I really can't believe it. It's all so stunning.

Today my plan was to work my way down 93 (the Icefields Parkway), taking side trips and time to see things. It was incredible. The first roadside stop I made was just a beautiful lookout over a small lake, but along a hillside that had recently burned. I thought it looked pretty, so I wanted to share the picture. For some reason the dead standing trees with the young grassland (or sometimes a young forest) beneath it looks exceptionally pretty to me.

I would see a fair number of landscapes like this, along with roadside pullouts with educational materials explaining the importance of fire to this ecosystem. It wasn't anything we hadn't heard before, but it was interesting to read about their plans for controlled burns on a regular basis.

I first took a side road to go up to Medicine Lake. It's a switchback up a steep, narrow, hanging valley (I was familiar with the concept of these from previous hikes in the Rockies). More pretty, stunning, views of mountains and forests.

Medicine Lake, however, was surprising. It looked like a turquoise blue, partially drained, reservoir. Then I read the information signs.

This lake has no outlet, and yet, every summer, it drains so low that the northern end is mostly just mudflats.

It turns out that the rock below the lake is fractured, and it drains out the bottom! Only in the summer when there's not enough rain or snowmelt to keep it full does it really drain.

Then it was off to Mount Edith Cavell. It was a long twisty road, with a snow-capped mountain in the distance that turned out to be the mountain the road took me to. With Angel Glacier on it, and its remains at the base, including a (turquoise) lake, with small icebergs in it.

There's a huge pile of boulders at the base of the glacier -- moraines. The landscape is really so fractal here that it's hard to judge distances. There are boulders of every size, so it's hard to tell if that's a man-sized rock quite a distance away, or a small rock closer in. It's made even more difficult by the spruce trees repopulating the moraine (since the glacier is retreating, that gives a place for trees to grow where they hadn't been able to, previously). They kind of look the same, regardless of scale -- again, is this a waist-high tree close by, or a 20 foot high tree in the distance? It's hard to tell.

Climbing on all the rocks, it was easy to misjudge distance and get too high or too far away from where you wanted to go. There really was no sense of scale. I was a giant and a fly, at the same time.

On/in the glacier at the base, there were a couple of large ice holes (cave-ins from above that created a tunnel from the top to the stones at the base) and a cave at the base.

There was a breeze of cold air coming out of this cave, and you could hear rushing water deep within the cave. I guessed that the cave went all the way back to the base of the cliff where the waterfalls were. I walked in to take pictures, but couldn't go very far because I had left my flashlight in the car. I thought about hiking back to the parking lot to get it, but decided that it was stupid enough of me to consider going into the treacherous ice cave alone. I saw a more prepared couple go in together (and later, come out), but I decided the wise thing to do was not to explore.

On the walk back to the car I met a couple who had seen me go in, and were glad to see that I had made it out. We joked about how easily I could have become famous, like that child who fell into the crevasse: "A man was killed in 2008 walking into an ice cave. Don't let this happen to you!".

The day went on -- I stopped at a spot where two rivers, of different shades of milky green, merged. I stopped at Athabasca Falls, which were kind of slightly larger version of Huntington Gorge, made extremely accessible to literally b'zillions of tourists.

I travelled further south. Every turn had another incredibly spectacular view. I stopped a lot. I took a lot of pictures. I soaked up the majesty. It was never-ending.

At a spot just north of the Icefields Centre I stopped at a pullout to capture this view. At the pullout were a couple of hikers who were trying to hitchhike back to their car. It took a moment for us all to realize that my French was actually much better than their English. André and Mimi from near Ottawa -- it was also their first time at the park and after I moved a lot of stuff around I was able to fit them in my car. We then shared exclamations and superlatives about how wonderful this park was.

When I mentioned that my legs were still sore from the hike I did at Glacier, they told me about a short hike that gave the best view of any they'd been on -- the Parker Ridge Trail, just south of the Icefields Centre, which goes up a ridge to give a spectacular view of Saskatchewan Glacier. I decided to try and do it tomorrow.

After dropping them off, I headed to the Icefields Centre, which I hadn't been to yet. I toured the museum to learn more about the Columbia Icefields, and glaciers in general. The ranger station had closed, but I got information about ice tours (where they take you on a big-treaded bus up onto the Athabaska Glacier) and decided to try and do one of them first thing in the morning.

And then it was time to figure out where I was going to spend the night. I headed down to Lake Louise Village, thinking it would be about the size of Jasper, when in fact it was quite tiny. I didn't feel like camping again (although it would have been much simpler if I had just left my tent up at Pocahontas). At the Visitors Centre they recommended a hotel (there are no cheap hotels in the parks), or a hostel. I decided to try the hostel.

I got a bed in a dorm room -- two bunk beds. I figured it would be nice to sleep in a bed, and to get a hot shower (yes, I said that -- I wanted a hot shower). I met two of my other roomies (Shawn from Australia, and Irwin from Calgary), and read until I was tired.