The Columbia Icefields

Athabasca Glacier (behind me)

About 100 miles north of Banff is the Columbia Icefield and the Icefield Centre. This tourist stop boasts plenty of parking and a self guided history and info exhibit on the glaciers in the surrounding mountains. We stopped to take a look.

A major feature of the site is that for $50 they will take you up onto the glacier. This is a two step process. You get a ticket for a bus ride, in a greyhound type bus, ½ way up the mountain to the terminal for the glacier vehicles. You then leave the bus.

Consuelo descending from the Explorer

The glacier vehicles, called "Icefield Explorers" are specially built mountain buses with 4' wide tires. The floor is about 4' off the ground. The trip starts with a steep 18 degree descent into a pool of water at the edge of the glacier, designed to help clean any dirt from to tires so that the glacier stays clean. A dirty glacier attracts sunlight and melts too fast. Then the bus climbs onto the packed snow that is the glacier itself, ove a graded “road” on the ice. A turnaround area in the middle of the glacier provides a place to get out and walk on the glacier.

The day was sunny and bright, and the temperature in the parking lot was a balmy 75 degrees or so, definitely above normal for this area at this time of year. At the glacir bus terminal, a thermometer registered 60 degrees, still comfortable. Up on the glacier, which had lots of meltwater runoff, it was much closer to freezing, but still sweatshirt weather.

Drinking glacier water

We were still about 1000 feet below the top of the ice field, 2000 feet below the surrounding mountain tops, which reach to about 11,000 feet. Where we stood on the glacier, it was 900 feet thick. The glacier had receded ½ mile from it's farther extension, and is now receding at a rate of about 90 feet per year.

At the foot of the glacier are annual moraines, mounds of dirt created as the glacier advances and retreats. Along the sides are lateral moraines. The bus route was built in a flat spot between moraines, partly on the edge of the glacier. The roadway moves about 4 feet every year.

The glacier we traversed is called the Athabaskan Glacier, alongside Mount Athabasca to the south. At the foot of the glacier is a pond which is the headwaters of the Athabasca River, which was nearly a mile wide by the time we left it east of Jasper.

Between Mount Athabasca and Mount Andromeda was a smaller glacier, dubbed “Double A” from the names of the mountains.