I Melt With You

We visited six Parks Canada National Parks in our week or so west of Calgary at the beginning of summer this year: Banff, Yoho, Kootenay, Jasper, Glacier and Mount Revelstoke. In one of those parks, we stood on a glacier, one of those slow moving masses of ice that did so much to carve out the Canadian Rockies and make them as spectacular as they are today. You might naturally assume that we visited a glacier in Glacier National Park. You'd be wrong. Time for some Jasper stories. Welcome to Canadian Rockies Park blog post number four. 

When we planned this trip to Canada earlier this year, we decided to stay in a town in British Columbia called Golden. Golden is situated effectively between Yoho National Park and Glacier National Park and it would enable us to get to each of the parks we hoped to spend time in without any sort of crazy long drives in any one day. For what it's worth, I'm OK driving six to seven hours a day on vacation as long as there are plenty of stops. Golden would allow seven hours on the road to be about the maximum time we'd spend in the car in any one day while also hitting all six parks.

If there was a compromise we'd have to make staying in Golden, it would be that we'd have to only make it part of the way into Jasper National Park. That seemed to be a good choice: the big attraction we picked to visit in Jasper (the glacier) was in the south end of the park close to Banff National Park and Jasper had been the victim of some massive wildfires last year so maybe what we presumed would be a burned out landscape would make it the best to do on a limited visit. 

Plus, five out of six ain't bad, right?

Then we got to Canada and started talking to people. 

I'm not generally one to second guess my own decisions, particularly when it comes to travel. But folks that we met in Canada made Jasper sound pretty special. It sounded wilder and more remote and filled with all the wildlife we were looking for that we didn't find (for the most part) in the other five parks. 

Regrets? I'm not sure I'm going all the way to that sort of thing just yet. The tales are one thing and if we had discovered what people seemed to promise what Jasper could be...then yes, there might be a bit of regret. A bit. I'm not there yet. And I won't get there certainly any time soon. We make our choices and we live with them. 

But if there's one place we didn't visit on this trip that would make me go back to the same area of our planet, it is Jasper National Park. And I'd probably do it a little later in the summer when the berries are on the bushes so that countless grizzly bears just line the sides of the road to Maligne Lake totally oblivious to tourists just pulled over to watch them eat. Or at least that's what I'm imagining based on the stories we were told. Those stories may be a bit tall.

Add Jasper to the "next time" list along with canoeing, Emerald Lake when it's not misty and Lake O'Hara after a successful lottery try. For sure, if we ever do find ourselves in Calgary headed west again, I am pretty confident in stating that we'll be headed to Jasper. And not just for the day.

Having said all that, we did visit Jasper National Park this year.

We spent most of our driving time west of Calgary on the Trans-Canada Highway, which for the most part is a two-lane (each way) divided highway cutting its way through the path that years earlier had been surveyed and used as the route for the Canadian Pacific Railway. Indeed, look to one side or the other of that road when you are driving it and it's easy to spot the railroad tracks running alongside today's road and sometimes it may be topped with a very long cargo train.

Making the trip to Jasper takes you off the Trans-Canada Highway. And when you make the turn towards Jasper, the road instantly looks a lot different. Now it's one lane each way and it's not divided. And then there's that sign that says there's no cell phone service for the next 150 kilometers or so. Visiting Jasper is different than Banff or Yoho or Kootenay.

We made it as far down (or up, considering we were heading north) that road as Athabasca Falls, which considering my whining earlier about not being able to make it far into Jasper from Golden is to within about 30 minutes of the town of Jasper and about 75 minutes from Maligne Lake along the road with packs of grizzlies (allegedly) on both side of the road just hanging out eating berries. But considering we'd already driven about 3-1/2 hours just to get to Athabasca Falls, we'd be adding at least another 2-1/2 hours to what was already a seven hour drive that day. 

Next time.

The road to Jasper. Technically still in Banff. Check out those mountains.

Before we got to our turnaround spot of Athabasca Falls, we stopped at our primary Jasper target: the glacier bearing the same name as the Falls. 

A visit to Athabasca Glacier is not a casual thing. It's not like pulling off the side of the road to see most of the other gorgeous scenery in these Parks Canada parks. You can't drive yourself up onto the ice, and walking over the thing without any sort of map showing all the massive crevasses 150 feet or more deep that will crush you to death when the ice moves is not a smart idea either. I assume nobody does the second thing today but we were told stories of people missing on the Glacier and rescue squads refusing to go looking because the odds of survival after falling into a glacier are basically nil.

To get on the Glacier, you need to book a tour. And across from the Glacier there's a visitor center that will allow you to do just that. We picked the Columbia Icefield Adventure, which involves a trip up onto the ice followed by a stop at a viewpoint over the valley featuring a cantilevered glass-floored walkway. Yeah...not particularly interested in that last part. It was all about the Glacier for us.

On our way up to Athabasca. The "dirt" is ash from wildfires.

Time for a news flash: we are not the first people to set foot on Athabasca Glacier. Not ever. Not this century. Not this year. Not even the day we visited, despite the fact that we were on the first tour time of the day. Somehow (and I'm guessing here on the number a bit...) there were about 100 people up there before us the day we visited. And I swear we booked the first tour.

The indigenous people in the area, the Stoney Nakoda, were likely regular visitors to the spot they called Cha-a tonga for centuries before the white man showed up in what is now Canada and grabbed their land. On this last subject (the land-grabbing one), the Canadians refer to the treaties signed between the Canadian government and the native populations by treaty number. Access to the Athabasca Glacier is covered under Treaty 8. And sure, there's some compensation and an understanding that less than maximum persecution of native peoples will take place after the treaty was signed, but it's still a land grab.

Once white people started visiting the area for fun, the first roads were laid into the area by and for mountaineers. The global depression of the 1930s saw the first government-sponsored road constructed past the Glacier but it was in the 1950s after World War II that people started jumping in cars for an up-close look at Athabasca. Time to start some tours and start making some money.

The first excursions to the Glacier in the '50s were on horseback. Thank God they don't do that any more. Times have for sure changed. You get up to the spot where you are allowed to stand on the ice today by taking a bus from a parking area up to a second parking / departure area where you get into a bus-sized all-terrain vehicle equipped with six five-foot (or so) tall tires. These monsters will navigate over the top of the Glacier, including going down (and then back up again) a 35 degree plus slope. Think that sounds like a gentle grade? Think again.

I can't imagine getting up the Glacier on horseback. Full disclosure, I've never been on a horse and really don't have it on my life list in any way but that's not why I can't imagine visiting a glacier while on a horse. It just sounds too slippery and dangerous. Between the horses and today's ATVs-on-steroids vehicles, they used what look like regular cars and I really can't imagine going up in those vehicles. There's one of those older vehicles (shown below) outside the Starbucks at the visitor center. It doesn't even look like it can be driven on snow, let alone down (and then back up again) a steep icy slope.

Don't pop one of those five feet high tires by the way. They apparently cost just shy of $7K CAD with about a $4K CAD install.

Transportation to the Glacier: Today (bottom) and the horses-to-today transition vehicle (top).

The glacier we stood on after we got out of our transportation is actually a finger (or what's known as a moraine) of the Athabasca Glacier. There was a time that it extended over the road that we drove up, past the visitor center and part way up the mountain behind the visitor center. Now it's a whole lot smaller. These things are disappearing. And fast. There's a lake at the bottom of the finger we visited that is pretty big; three years ago, it didn't exist. There was a lot of water rushing past and around us while we stood on and admired the disappearing giant. I get that it was summer (although barely) when we were there but the amount of melting was astonishing to me.

This disappearing is really why we decided to take this trip. Because pretty soon although maybe not in my lifetime, this Glacier might be gone. And that "maybe" in the previous sentence is not a sure thing. We were told 30 to 80 years is the estimated future lifespan of Athabasca. There's a chance I'll be here in 30 years and the glacier we stood on in early July won't. This thing has been around since the last Ice Age or at least 12,000 years but likely a lot more. But it won't be here at the end of this century in all likelihood. 

We were told (and I have not been able to verify this figure) that glaciers supply 75% of the planet's fresh water. Not that Athabasca's going to be the last one but what happens when they are gone? 

The Athabasca Glacier melting.

This is not our first time up close and personal with a glacier. We got pretty close to a couple  in Alaska in 2017 (including one incredibly intimate encounter on a very large cruise ship, if that statement is even credible) and we actually spent some time walking over the top of one and avoiding falling into somewhere we'd never return from in Iceland. 

Compared to those two experiences, this one could have been considered a bit of a bust. You get driven to a spot on the ice, get out of the vehicle and then spent 20-30 minutes wandering around within the very small roped-in area before heading back the other way. It was certainly not as spectacular as watching and hearing ice fall into the sea in Alaska and was nowhere near as interactive as actually trekking across a field of ice atop crampons right before the winter solstice in Iceland. 

But these experiences are fleeting and special and not long for this world and the landscape in the Canadian Rockies is just spectacular everywhere so to see it from a different perspective stood atop a slightly slushy glacier was still something to treasure. This is not something we are likely to repeat. We do still have all of the rest of Jasper that we omitted on this trip to explore and I'd love to think that one day we'll be driving past the Athabasca Glacier again. And I'm sure the next time we do, the size of this thing (or really the lack thereof) will send chills down my spine.

O Canada! And OF COURSE you exit through the gift shop.

There are two other memories of Jasper worth sharing.

First, Athabasca Falls is worth a stop. It's more of a rapids than a true falls, although admittedly not one I'd want to kayak or canoe through. Although, let's face it, I don't want to kayak or canoe through any rapids on any river anywhere in the world. For perspective, it's more on the Natural Bridge level than the Takakkaw Falls level (both Yoho National Park references). 

Athabasca Falls also appeared to be at about the southern end of last year's wildfires. When we rolled into the parking area, we passed a charred landscape with bare pine tree trunks standing straight up with zero foliage or even branches. Every time we pass through an area like this, I can't imagine how ferocious these fires are. I've been past too many of these sorts of scenes, including one in Northern California in 2018 where the fire was still raging maybe just a few miles off. Scary stuff. 

Second...that cantilevered, glass-floored walkway that they call the Skywalk? We went out there. I mean we had to. The bus doesn't go directly back to the visitor center. And while we were there we figured we'd take in the views and step onto the glass walkway backwards and take a picture. Just one step. Very courageous, right? 

So then I figured...how old am I and how scared I am that I can't walk out onto a glass-floored walkway that is clearly remaining structurally stable despite having been in place with people walking on it every day for years and years? So I walked it. The whole thing. Start to finish. I even stopped and took a picture of the view when I was standing on the walkway. 

Take that, fear of heights!!!!

However...

I did this under the following conditions. (1) I did not look down; I knew there was a seriously good chance that if I did, I would stop dead in place and be unable to move. (2) I held onto the handrail all the way along with the exception of one small spot where there was a family that was just messing around and clearly not looking to move. Come on, people. I'm trying to walk this thing as quickly as possible. And (3) when I took the below photograph, I pulled my iPhone up to my face rather than looking down (see number 1 above) to unlock the phone. 

I am pretty confident I looked like a scared little baby motoring over that glass floor looking obviously straight ahead unflinchingly. But I did it. And yes, that cantilever was bouncing noticeably. And yes, that was a bit unnerving.

But now I can say I've been there, done that. For the Skywalk anyway. Not Jasper. I feel we have some unfinished business. Next time.

The view from the Skywalk. No looking down.

Cold As Ice

Towards the end of each trip I take, there comes an inevitable "taking stock" moment, an in-process assessment of how great the current trip has been and how I might best remember my experiences. Usually that moment includes a decision about how many blog posts each vacation is worth and a mental sequencing of those blog posts. After the last landing on our Alaska cruise, and knowing that I'd be for sure writing a post about my pending visit to Denali National Park, I decided Alaska would get three blog posts and that would be it. Not very many for a trip of over a week in length but it would be what it was. 

The very next day, we sailed (using that term loosely) past the Hubbard Glacier. Now there's a fourth (and last) Alaska post.

It feels weird to be writing what I'm about to write but in a way, I was sort of no stranger to glaciers by the time I reached Hubbard. In December of 2013, I spent the better part of an Icelandic winter day walking on one. Then the day before I laid eyes on Hubbard, I'd spent all too short a time gazing at the Mendenhall Glacier just north of Alaska's capital of Juneau. But what I saw from the boat on that Thursday early morning blew Iceland and Mendenhall away. By a lot.

I remember two things pretty vividly from my 2013 glacier walk. First, our guide describing the glaciers as entities in motion and not just solid blocks of ice sitting in one location. Second, the incredibly beautiful and otherworldly blue color of the ice. If you are a Game of Thrones fan, think the color of blue on the white walkers. It's a perfect match to the hues in a glacier. Visiting Hubbard reinforced what I remember from December 2013 so clearly.

Small icebergs dotting the sea on the approach to the Hubbard Glacier.

I awoke on Thursday morning, August 17 in my cruise ship bed with great anticipation. Finally there was something to see from the boat itself. If my first ocean cruise experience taught me anything, it was that your vacation sort of gets put on hold once you get back on the ship. That day of sailing was about to be different, at least for a few hours. There's no way I could have had the same experience on land that I was about to see from the sea.

Stepping out onto the balcony of our room that morning was cold but not overly so. Not like I needed a heavy jacket or anything. But scattered about the sea were a few icebergs. Yes, icebergs! The water was so cold that chunks of ice were not melting in the water. I'm not talking Titanic sinkers or anything here but looking down at that milky green salt water I could imagine it was close to freezing. As we headed further and further north, we picked up more and more icebergs around us.

Perhaps a little background about glaciers is in order? These things are essentially giant slow-moving freshwater frozen rivers that flow downhill based on their own weight. Along the way they erode the surface of the land by picking up chunks of rocks and flowing those down to wherever the glacier happens to end. I could tell some of the icebergs around our boat had broken off from Hubbard because I could see pretty good sized chunks of rock embedded in some of them. Yep, I was on a boat watching rocks on top of ice floating by. Pretty wild!

The Hubbard Glacier is approximately 76 miles long from beginning to end. If that seems like a long way, it is but not so much really by glacier standards. Glaciers cover approximately 10% of the Earth's land and the world's largest glacier, Lambert Glacier in Antarctica, is 60 miles wide and 270 miles long. Having just poo-pooed the size of Hubbard, it still takes the ice in the glacier approximately 400 years to travel the full 76 miles. That meant that the ice we saw at the edge of the glacier had been added to the flow in the second decade of the 1600s.

Close up look at the face of Hubbard Glacier.

While I'm speculating about just how gorgeous the entire 76 miles of the Hubbard Glacier might be, the face of the glacier where the ice met the sea was spectacularly beautiful. Glaciers are blue for two reasons: (1) they lack air bubbles which generally causes ice to look white and (2) water molecules absorb colors of the spectrum other than blue much more efficiently that they absorb blue. This is the same reason why large bodies of water often appear to be a bluish color.

The variations of blue in the face of Hubbard are amazing and you can see the layers of ice that have formed on top of one another and the debris the glacier has carried with it throughout the four centuries it has flowed to the ocean. Look at the pure white snow on the mountains in the distance to understand just how blue the palest of pale blues are. It also has these incredible vertical cracks splitting the horizontal layers. The amount of pressure the ice must have been under to make those kinds of cracks must be immense.

When we finally got as close as we could get, we were staring at a wall of ice probably (and I'm guessing here because there was nothing really to give it any sort of scale) about 50 feet high. In some spots it was barely clinging on to itself where the horizontal strata clearly showed some signs that it looked to be collapsing into the ocean.

A portion of the glacier collapsing into the sea.

And indeed sitting and watching that's exactly what happened. In the hour or so we sat on the boat close to the glacier, piece after piece fell into the ocean to be reclaimed by the sea and let more of the ice behind get ready to do the same. If you had asked me what I expected the face of a glacier to look like, I would have thought it tapered into the land or sea at its end. The view of pieces breaking off a sheer wall was unexpected but likely way more impressive than an edge tapering to nothing and slowly drip-melting into the sea.

This sounds stupid but standing and watching, it was obvious the glacier was moving. Not so much by the fact that some of it was actually collapsing into the water but by the sounds you could hear. Glacier watching is very much an aural experience as well as a visual one. The sounds we were hearing were described as "white thunder": creaking, squeaking sounds caused by the ice compressing itself and moving and cracking under its own weight before releasing the pressure and moving again. Between these creaking sounds, every so often there were sounds that I imagine are just what an avalanche sounds like: slowly building rushing sounds like a lot of fine powder is descending from a great height.

Admittedly, watching a glacier is not too exciting and staying out on our balcony and later on deck for a time that lasted maybe two and a half hours total I didn't see a whole lot happen. But it's not like I will ever see this much again in the future. I don't have too many cold weather destinations on my list and I certainly don't have a lot of boat rides planned in those places that get that cold. Spending a small portion of one morning in my life watching this was worth it. And a total unexpected surprise for a time when I expected my vacation to go back on hold. Watching this wall of blue ice and hearing it move and tear and splinter against the backdrop of Alaska's mountains was a good morning.

The Hubbard Glacier from afar with the cold cold sea in front and the massive mountains behind.

Glacier Walking 101

Despite the lack of an Aurora Borealis sighting, I had an incredible time in Iceland. Every day over there included either some unique Icelandic moment or an "I never thought I would do this in my life ever" experience. While the first and second days we were in Iceland were amazing, by far the best day was the last full day we spent in country when we headed to the south coast of the island and went for a stroll on a glacier for a couple of hours. This is definitely something I never thought I would do in my life.

Iceland is the 17th largest (of 45 if you include Monaco and Vatican City) country in Europe but it is home to more glacial areas than all the other countries in Europe combined. A lot of this obviously has to do with its position on the globe, although there are parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland that are further north. More than 10 percent of the island's total area is covered in glaciers with about 80 percent of that total concentrated in the glacier Vatnajökull on the southeast of the country. We didn't make it that far on our trip.

Our destination Friday morning was the glacier with the almost unpronounceable name of Eyjafjallajökull, specifically the spur of that glacier named Sonheimajökull, which is somehow way less of a tongue twister despite its 14 letters. If the name Eyjafjallajökull sounds familiar at all, it is because it sits on top of the volcano of the same name which erupted in April of 2010 ceasing all air travel over the north Atlantic Ocean for six days. Eyjafjallajökull is by no means the largest volcano in Iceland (the whole country is volcanic, after all); its neighbor, Katla, last blew in 1918 and is overdue for an eruption. Our guide for the day told us an eruption from Katla has the potential to halt all air traffic in the northern hemisphere for six months!

The trip to Sonheimajökull takes about two and a half hours from Reykjavik, including the last five kilometers on a snow, ice and slush covered gravel road which our 15 passenger van handled with alarming ease. I'm not sure what kind of tires that thing had on it, but our guide and driver, Atli, didn't seem to have any problems, even going up hill or down some pretty steep slopes with 90 degree bends immediately at the bottom. I spent five winters driving to work in snow every day in upstate New York and I was impressed.

Crampons on! Ready to go!

Once we reached the end of the road, a parking lot full of other vehicles smaller and larger than our van, it was time to gear up. We zipped up our jackets, pulled up hoods, donned gloves and were handed an ice axe (never really thought I'd use that term in my blog) for the walk over snow covered volcanic rock and debris to the edge of the glacier. There we stopped and learned how to strap on our crampons to our boots and were ready to ascend onto the blue ice of the glacier itself. The crampons themselves were sharp but very flimsy looking and looked almost like the old time roller skates that you tied on over your sneakers. Not super encouraging.

Glaciers, despite their solid appearance, are anything but a stationary block of ice. They are constantly flowing on a layer close to the earth that is either liquid or semi-frozen and they contain tunnels and voids that change as the glacier moves. Our guide gave us one rule to follow before we stepped onto the glacier: follow in his footsteps exactly. I wondered if this word of caution was alarmist until, as if to prove his point, he poked around the glacier with his five foot long walking stick and then managed to submerge the entire length in snow, explaining that the hole he had just found may go as deep as 20 meters (over 65 feet). Point taken. I'm following him from now on.

Our guide, Atli, demonstrating how deep the snow is in spots by burying his walking stick into the snow.

The trip to the top of the glacier was gorgeous, a nice slow pace with plenty of stops to look around at the Game of Thrones beyond the Wall landscape punctuated by a mini rock avalanche that made us glad we were not close to the cliff where the rock fell. We mostly walked on snow covered areas and stayed in a straight line but walking on the clear ice was amazing; our crampons served us just fine. We managed to find an ice tunnel to walk through and saw diagonal striations in the ice that were caused by the movement of the glacier.

The color of the ice was otherworldly. It really is noticeable as completely different from the color of regular ice. There was a frozen lake at the bottom of the glacier that looked nothing like the glacier itself.

We got to the glacier at about 2:30 p.m. so after an hour to 90 minutes on the glacier, the sun was setting and we turned around it was getting to be time to walk back down in the fading daylight / early night (yes, early night after sunset at 3:20 p.m.!!!). So after some last pictures at the top of the glacier, we started back downhill.

The view from the top.

Walking uphill on solid ice is pretty easy: gravity works with you and I tend to look at the ground and not focus on the top of the ascent since I like to see where I am placing my feet, especially if not looking where I am going means I might drop down into a snow filled ice tunnel. Turning around and walking down is a whole different experience. My first reaction when I turned and started heading down what seemed to me to be a very steep and very slippery ice slope was "how the hell did we get up here and where's the path home?"

Looking downhill allows you to see all the curves and shapes in the glacier. It is simultaneously beautiful and terrifying, knowing that one false step, one slip, will send you on a long slide down over very hard surfaces into a frozen lake (in other words, pretty much sure death). I, of course, elected to walk down immediately behind our guide, meaning if one of my fellow tour takers slipped and fell, I'd be in danger of being taken out as well. I stepped very carefully and firmly on the way down, driving the spikes of my crampons with purpose until we got off the steepest slopes, which seemed sometimes too steep to hold me on a series of metal spikes.

Ultimately we all made it down off the glacier without slipping, although we did have one fall once we got back onto more solid snow covered volcanic gravel. We arrived back at the parking lot in the fading light of the day, when the low cloud covered sun made the almost monochromatic landscape totally black, white and gray. The couple of hours we spent walking up and down an ice slope, at its heart such a simple exercise, was literally one of the most exciting things I have done in recent memory. Not that we needed it to salvage the trip or anything, but that day made the whole trip worthwhile. I won't soon forget it.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the company, Icelandic Mountain Guides, that led our tour. We didn't pick these guys (they were handed to us as part of our IcelandAir holiday package) but we couldn't have ended up in more capable hands. In addition to showing me an experience I won't ever forget, we soaked up a ton of knowledge from our guide, Atli, on the drive out and back. I learned more than I could possibly hope to about Iceland in less than four days and we got so much out of that tour. I would recommend anyone looking to go on a glacier walk to seek this company out. They were incredible.