Alberta road trip, Post 4: Icefields Parkway

We've just returned today from a wonderful 4 nights in Las Vegas, Nevada, but I have a lot more to get you up to date on before I can start telling you about it! We have also just signed up to pay Google a small annual fee to increase our photo/video storage limit for the blog, as we had reached 100%. Our new limit is 10 times as much as we have used in the last 2 years!!!

On Wednesday, we drove the 340 km from Jasper to Kananaskis... along the 230 km of the Icefields Parkway through Jasper National Park and Banff National Park, and on into Kananaskis Country south of the Rockies. This was an incredible drive with stunning scenery, frequent wildlife sightings, and the opportunity to see places I have been hearing about for years. I had heard about Banff and Lake Louise from my Canadian grade 1 teacher (who will shortly feature on this blog!), and Ben had done most of this drive when he lived in Canada 6 years ago.


The most exciting and memorable moment of the day was definitely our first ever wild bear sighting! As we were driving along a straight stretch of highway, speed limit 90 km/hr, we noticed a brown furry thing in the grass beside the road, just as we passed it. We quickly realised it was a bear, which then started crossing the road, and as Ben turned the car around and drove slowly back towards it, I thrust the camera out of the window and took the following shot:


I got a few other photos as well, but this was the best one as the bear quickly reached the edge of the road. We were very excited to see a bear AND be the first ones on the scene! (The oncoming car in the photo had cameras poking out its windows by the time it got level with us.) Getting this photo actually turned out to be quite a saga, as that evening when I transferred my photos onto my laptop, I discovered that 60 photos from Wednesday morning had disappeared off my camera for an unknown reason. Over the next two days, Ben downloaded and ran photo recovery programs from the Internet until he was eventually able to recover this precious photo and the others as well. Thank goodness for a geeky husband!!! :D

We also saw two more bears - black ones - later on in the day, but these we found because both times we came across a crowd of cars and camera-wielding tourists lining the sides of the road. Yes, this is exactly what all the brochures say NOT to do. But we figured that with only one bear and so many people, chances are we could outrun at least one of the others should it come to that... ;) Kidding!! The bears were both a way back in the trees and seemed completely oblivious to their audience. But our first bear sighting was by far the highlight.


Around the middle of the Icefields Parkway, where Jasper National Park connects up with Banff National Park, is the Columbia Icefield. The icefield has eight glaciers, and the Athabasca Glacier is the one in the photo below (it's the sweep of ice down the middle), as seen from the highway. In summer, tourists can take a tour over it in a "snow coach", a funny-looking raised bus with huge tyres. Ben actually did the tour 6 years ago, but we didn't do it on this trip - just took a couple of photos and drove on. It's a pretty impressive chunk of ice though, even though it's receding! Look for the people and cars at the bottom of the photo below for a sense of scale.


Our main non-driving activity of the day was a short hike up to Bow Summit to see down over Lake Peyto, which Megan and Justin had just done and recommended to us. What a view!!!


We also stopped briefly at Lake Louise, which was quite crowded and we didn't stay long. It was very pretty though! Near the lake we saw a number of relatively tame squirrels and chipmunks, and this was another highlight of the day for me! I had never seen a chipmunk before and I have decided that I love them even more than I love squirrels (which is really saying something). They are only about half the size of a squirrel, with stripes along their bodies, and they are so soooooo adorable!!!!! My photo of a chipmunk is not that great, so if you are keen on sweet tiny creatures, click here to see a really cute photo courtesy of Wikipedia. :)


After lunch at a Mexican cantina in Banff, we reached Kananaskis Country mid-afternoon. We stopped for a while at a pretty lake, and in the late afternoon we checked in to our accommodation for the night, which was... a teepee!!! Yes, we stayed in a large (4-person) "tipi" at Sundance Lodges and Campground near Kananaskis Village - they also have trappers' tents and 2-person tipis, but didn't have the latter available when I booked.


Staying in a tipi was quite fun! It had wooden floorboards, four beds with plastic-coated mattresses (we had our sleeping bags and pillows), a gas lamp, and a kerosene heater. Our tipi was in its own little clearing, a short distance from the neighbouring campsites and surrounded by trees. We were given precise instructions on the precautions to take to ensure bears would not come knocking (i.e. lock food and toiletries in car, NOT in tent - in fact, there was no way to lock or even secure the tent flap!). That night we went to sleep unusually early, slept very soundly, and were not troubled by any bears. :)

CLICK HERE to view our Alberta road trip photos.