Day 16 – Friday 9th June – Whistler Campground to Kootenay Plains

Today’s drive is on the famous Icefields Parkway and is one of the great drives of the world.  This is Highway 93 and also a section of the Trans-Canada Highway and passes through some of the most outstanding and spectacular scenery we have seen so far.

We resolve to make an early start and skip breakfast planning to have it on the road.  Our first stop is at the Athabasca Falls and they do not disappoint.  Here the wide Athabasca River plunges over a series of waterfalls and is forced into a narrow gorge before being released from its confines to regain its full width as the gorge opens out once more.  The sheer power of the water being forced through this narrow space is hard to imagine and today the Alberta Gorge Rescue team is undertaking a training exercise to prepare for some future rescue.  The lead safety guy comes form Australia and travels the world for six months every year training mountain rescue and similar teams in “difficult” rescues.  We are told that most of the Alberta team’s “rescues” are body retrievals and when you look down into the gorge it is not difficult to appreciate why this is.



Back to the RV and on we go.  Mary has marked on the Jasper Park guide to the Icefields Parkway some key locations to visit as we make our way along it and first up is the next series of waterfalls at Sunwapta.  Once again we park up and walk first to the Upper Falls where we have plenty of others to keep us company, then the walk of a just one kilometer brings us to the spectacular Lower Falls where we are almost alone.

The mountain tops are covered in cloud which is a shame as this would have been a spectacular part of the journey.  Our next destination is the Icefield Centre and Columbia Icefield itself.  We have an open mind about whether or not we shall take the Ice Explorer onto the glacier itself.  We decide that we shall start by walking up to the terminus of the glacier and so park, put on warm clothing and head up the track.  This is a bit of a scramble as we are climbing the loose scree and rocks of the terminal moraine.  Soon we reach the warning notices as the rock we are walking on is a thin layer over the ice of the snout a few feet below us.  Ahead is the huge sheet of ice which is the Columbia Icefield.  The Ice Explorer coaches and the individual people walking on it give some impression of the sheer size but the weather is closing in and we cannot see the upper end of the icefield as it is now shrouded in cloud.


We return to the RV and head across to the Icefield Centre.  The more we think about it the less we feel the need to pay a large amount of money to Brewsters to get on a coach, be taken to the Glacier Skywalk, get back on the coach to be taken to the icefield to be driven onto the glacier by Icefield Explorer before returning to the centre by coach.  It smacks of Disneyworld does Nature!

So it is back on the road and down to Saskatchewan Crossing and the side trip up to Kootenay Plains Campground where parking on the grass and under the trees is informal and the most like our preferred camping environment!

This evening we have a fascinating talk by an Environmental Officer for the Park who doubles as a “peace officer” complete with sidearm, handcuffs x2, pepper spay and a nightstick or baton!  He shares information and stories about his work with environmental scientists, local wildlife, the native first nation population, the history and ecology of the area and his environmental protection work against poachers and illegal hunting.  Altogether a great evening.

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