Jasper National Park

Rolling out of Banff, I’ll be travelling the Ice Fields Parkway, which winds through the parks. Right away, I start climbing, and this country still has a lot of snow on it. Only a few miles in, I come across the massive snow slide (avalanche?) that closed this road last week. There’s still a lot of it here!

  

Here are some pix of the drive, the photos are good, but don’t truly do it justice. Hey, you know you can click on these photos to see the full size image, right? Just checking…

              

This is avalanche country, proclaimed by many warning signs along the road. I was stopped at a road construction point, and was taking some pix of the surrounding mountains, when I captured this. Yes, it’s an avalanche!

Still lots of snow piled up in the pull-offs. Great photo opps, tho!

              

All right, enough with the snowy road pix, already! OK, just a couple more…

  

Midway along, I came to Athabasca Glacier. There’s a huge visitor’s center, and they offer glacier expeditions (walk on a glacier!), and other sightseeing options, including one of those glass skywalks. Now, after travelling in Alaska, I have a pretty high standard for glaciers, but this one measured up pretty well.

        

Now, all that snow has to melt, and that leads to lots of water. Here’s a nice waterfall, one of several along the parkway. This is Sunwapta Falls.

     

I wondered about that big rock…. did it just get stuck there? Is it going to eventually go over the falls? I waited around a while, but it never budged.

  

Made it to the town of Jasper late in the day, and parked in Wapiti campground, just south of town. Much more the way I like it, big secluded sites, and mostly deserted, though it did fill up with rental RVs as the night progressed. That’s one thing I’ve noticed: There are many, many rental RVs up here, more than 75% of the RVs I see on the road are rentals. In fact, I’m surrounded by them!

  

I’ve met some of these folks, and they are from Germany, China, Australia, France, and even the middle East. I met a couple of young guys from Russia who are touring the entire width of Canada in an SUV, tenting it. Pretty cool! Anyway, this day ends like many of them do…. a cold beer, a cigar, and a new front yard. Wonder where I’ll be tomorrow…..