For one springtime week between avalanche season and tourist season, the spectacular road to Moraine Lake is open only to non-motorized traffic. What a ride!
Banff is a charming town, and a ride in a horse-drawn carriage is a great way to see the sights.
eating breakfast in the grass. He was unperturbed by the audience watching him and taking his photo, and he lumbered slowly along with grass hanging out of his mouth as he chewed. Carloads of people arrived and left and the bear continued to eat his fill. As we traveled north on the Icefields Parkway from there, we crossed over the boundary separating Banff National Park from Jasper National Park. About 50 miles north of Bow Lake we came to the Columbia Icefields. The snow on the mountains created fabulous patterns and seemed to be hundreds of feet deep in the peaks. When we got out of the truck, we could hear lots of avalanche activity all around us. Whole sides of mountains seemed to be tumbling down, and the roar was unmistakable. The Columbia Icefields is a popular destination with a massive visitors center and vast parking lot. Tourist buses were lined up in rows, and inside the visitors center we found ourselves surrounded by a gigantic crowd of tourists buying tickets for rides out onto the glaciers in unique tank-like vehicles called Snowcats. We decided we preferred a more personal and intimate kind of experience, so we decided to save a Snowcat adventure for another time. Further north, at Athabasca Falls in Jasper National Park,
a stunning waterfall and extensive boardwalk system lured us to some fabulous horizontally striped cliffs lapped by jade colored water. Finding our way down to a rocky beach, we suddenly noticed that someone had constructed over a hundred little stone cairns that looked like people with arms and legs and heads. We later learned that these little figures were called Inuksuit, a kind of art-in-nature that is popular among the aboriginal Inuit people of the far north. We got a huge kick out of wandering among these little statues. Eventually our days in the Canadian Rockies came to an end and we took our RV back across the border into the United States. But as we watched that incredible scenery drifting away in our rearview mirror we vowed to return. Even though we had spent three weeks exploring, we had barely scratched the surface.
FOR MORE INFORMATION Map: https://goo.gl/maps/7mLGPRpSdseNv9YY6 Banff National Park: www.pc.gc.ca/en/pn-np/ab/banff Jasper National Park: www.pc.gc.ca/en/pn-np/ab/jasper
Parks Canada offers the Discovery Pass: www.pc.gc.ca/en/voyage-travel/admission
CANADIAN ROCKIES
COAST TO COAST FALL MAGAZINE 2021
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