We slunk guiltily to the car (while our fellow hostellers loaded their worldly goods into their panniers and set off for 100km of mountainous cycling) and headed off to the Icefield Centre and the Athabasca glacier. Here you take a shuttle bus and then a Snocoach – a vehicle with metre wide wheels specially designed for travelling on the ice. Each one costs 1,3million $ and there are only 28 in the world of which 27 are here on the Columbia Icefield. The icefield is a huge glacier extending over a range of mountains, which is moving slowly downhill and eventually feeds into the Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
The tourbuses roll in and you do wonder about the environmental ethics of walking on the glacier, but it is all tightly controlled by the national parks and standing on a glacier is a breathtaking experience. As is putting your foot 8” down a hole into the glacial water as both Maya and I discovered.
Nearby we hiked up to Parker Ridge, a trail which zigzags up the mountain for about an hour. The girls pleaded lethargy and adolescence and were happier playing Nintendo in the car but there’s only so many times you can cajole people to experience the trip of a lifetime and anyway a couple of hours peace on a mountain top is a wonderful, restorative thing. The alpine wildflowers were incredible but nothing beat the final scramble up the ridge when another set of mountains suddenly appeared the far side and we realized that we were surrounded by 360º of snowy peaks. As we descended a car alarm went off way below and we exchanged bets on the probability of it having been set off by our dear daughters. Yup, you’re right! Back in the car, we left Nature to reinstall her earplugs and set off on the Parkway again, soon spotting our first black bear scavenging along the roadside.
We headed back to our hostel, but stopped for an hour to follow a woodland track to a bridge over the Saskatchewan river – here broad, aqua coloured and furious. Back at the hostel, it just had to be a sauna and dip in the creek to finish off the day.
