After two stunningly beautiful hot, sunny days of sightseeing in the Canadian Rockies, reality set in as the first rainy cold front of the fall season swept in. Unfortunately, this was the day for us to drive down the “Icefields Parkway”, a ~100 mile stretch of (here’s that phrase again) stunning beautiful glaciers and glacial lakes and glacial rivers. The Columbia Icefields, at the continental divide, feed eight major glaciers along the parkway, including one that comes down just about to the road itself, pictured above. One can tour this glacier with a purpose-built bus-like vehicle with huge tires (to prevent it from plummeting into any crevasses that may have opened up). In the picture above, you can see them as tiny ants about a third of the way up the glacier. Given the icy driving rain and wind, we decided to hold off on this tour until our next visit.
We saw a few of the sights between rainstorms, but it was a pretty miserable day…