I really dig the Athabasca Hotel in Jasper.  It has a real historic charm about it.  It’s about 100 years old and it shows.  The crown mouldings…the facets…the grand stairs…the dozens of stuffed animal heads on the wall…there’s a real “mountain railroad hotel” vibe there. It’s very cozy and relaxing.

I’ve stayed there on the Easy Rider Tour 2006, the Magical Mystery Tour 2008, and the Saving Private Ryan Tour 2011.  I usually score a “shared bathroom” queen room…meaning that the can is down the hall.  The room is a queen bed, a sink, a tiny TV on the wall, and about 15 square feet of walking space.  Very small, but a very comfortable bed and a reasonable rate for Jasper at $100/night. Sean and I each got one of these, and after the elongated morning shower/bathroom routine (cos you have to wait for everyone else) we were both up at ready for some mountain touring at about 8am.

After a quick breakfast at a local breakfast/pizzeria place we were in Sean’s SUV on the Icefields Parkway heading south.  Our first stop was to check out Mount Edith Cavell, a site that I’ve never seen after all these years of visiting Jasper National Park.

Reaching the site involves a steep mountain road with a sharp drop off that I would never attempt in the winter.  It takes about a half hour to get to, but at the top of the site is a parking lot the bottom end of a trail head.   After getting out of the car we read a few interpretive plaques to find that this site was a hiking trail that led up to viewing platform for a glacier on the side of Mount Edith Cavell.  We hiked about halfway up before heading back.  It was early in the morning but I was getting “punchy” with people on the trail…lots of tourist families with TODDLERS.  Toddlers! Who brings babies to walk up a steep mountain trail with sharp drop offs, jagged rocks, and giant boulders…lots of shit to fall down and crack their heads on!?  Some people are just morons.

We left the site and headed back to the Parkway, where we headed south for about fifteen minutes to Athabasca Falls.  I’ve been here several times but I never tire of the majesty of the place. It’s not just the Falls themselves- it’s the engineering of the parksite.  We’re talking about bridges and walkabouts right next to a raging waterfall that would kill you in a minute if you fell down it.  Some poor idiots have met their end there…mostly because they were jackasses messing around outside the marked fences and railings trying to be Mr. Cool Guy.

After the waterfall we continued our way south another half hour or so to the Columbia Icefield Centre.   Now THIS place is iconic.  I mean, it is the source glacier of some of the biggest rivers in the entire country, including the river that runs though my city…the North Saskatchewan.  Every single global warming alarmist out there uses this glacier to make their case because it is obviously receding year by year. More than that…it is one of the only glaciers out there that is publicly accessible for those who aren’t mountaineers.

Sean and I grabbed lunch at the centre (where we got REALLY punchy because of the rude tourists who have zero respect for personal space or common manners).  We ate some shitty, overpriced chinese food before heading across the parkway to the Columbia Glacier itself.  We hiked up a trail for about fifteen minutes before reaching the glacier.  To be clear…you are not supposed to walk onto the glacier without a paid-for guide and tour. We did anyway (as were hundreds of other people).  It was pretty cool to stand on.

The ice was cold (obviously), but it was also dirty and the gravel and sand in it created a grip that allows people to walk on it without having to slip and slide everywhere.   The little rivers of melt water were both beautiful and threatening, and I cringed at the thought of little children (or anyone really) who would fall down one of the giant cracks in the glacier and die from hypothermia and suffocation.  My childhood doctor passed away that way when he was hiking around here and fell into one.  Dr. Mutungi.  He was awesome.  Took my tonsils out.  Always made me laugh.

After walking on the glacier for a bit we took off and headed back north to Sunwapta Falls.  I convinced Sean that the 4km walk down to Lower Sunwapta Falls was worth it…so we hiked down the trail to check it out.  I was checking out rocks most of the way down.  While at the Columbia Glacier I started to collect some more rocks, and thought I’d add to my collection with some gneisses and granites that I was finding on the ground at the Sunwapta Falls.

The walk up and down the Falls took about an hour or so and rain was spitting the entire time.  We returned to our vehicle and headed back north to Jasper.  After a short nap we met to go get some dinner, which was followed by a few beers and some Golden Tee at the Whistle Stop Pub across the street from our hotel.  After a couple of hours we headed back to bed at around 10:00.

It was an enjoyable day in Jasper National Park.  The mountains are massive and are great examples of thrust faulting…you can actually see the giant layers of rocksliding over one another to form the Rockies.  This is a little different than the “smashing”forces that created the Columbia (Kootenay) ranges.  They were all created by the same tectonic forces, but there were millions of years between their formation and much of their composition is different as a result. The real amazing thing is how the plate pressure suddenly discontinued after the Rockies were formed…leaving the Canadian prairie unfaulted and  flat.

Tomorrow I was going to ride Silver across that prairie and back home.