Tripometer – 6215
Gas Gauge – 491.361 gal
Location – Whistlers Campground, Jasper National Park, AB, Canada
Lodging – $33 CAD
Cans of OFF – 4
We’ve been enjoying Jasper (just not the temperatures) so we decided to book an additional night in Whistlers Campground. This required us to move sites within the campground; however, we don’t have the tent beds out so moving the trailer is just a matter of hooking up the truck and moving the rig. Not too big of a deal. As a side note, this campground has street lights in each camping loop. The lights are relatively low power so they don’t illuminate the whole place or keep us up at night, but it’s still odd. We don’t think we’ve ever seen that in another campground before.
Today we decided to revisit the Athabasca Glacier in hopes that the weather would be better today. On our trip from Jasper back to the Glacier site (about a 1 hour drive) we came upon an elk by the side of the road. Now, we’ve all read stories about tourists getting too close to wildlife in National Parks, but this was by far the most outrageous example of this we’ve ever seen personally. Not only were people getting within about 10’ of the (male) elk to take pictures, the parents were allowing their children to run up and down the shoulder of the road with traffic jockeying to get by stopped tourists in a 50 mph zone. We held our breath the entire time we watched the scene. We left after grabbing the picture above. It was just too stressful to watch for too long.
Arriving back at the glacier we found the weather conditions were similar to two days ago – cold and windy. We were to later learn that the icefield and glacier conspire to keep these weather conditions fairly steady from day to day, but today we were dressed for the weather! The Columbia Icefield, located at the top of the glacier measures at 125 sq mi of ice and 1200 ft deep at its deepest point. The Athabasca Glacier flows three miles down off of the icefield plateau down to the valley floor where the Icefield Parkway runs.
We hiked up and on to the Glacier from the parking lot. At the moment his feet hit the glacier, Ranger seemed to know exactly what this was. One of his favorite treats at home is an ice cube, so naturally as soon as he realized what we were standing on he started to avidly consume said glacier with a voracity that was absolutely comical. Once he had consumed several mouthfuls of glacier he puppy danced around the glacier for at least the next 5 minutes, much to Kelly’s delight.
The smoke started to invade the area again as we drove back towards camp. We enjoyed the ‘Purple Mountain’s Majesty’ immensely as the sun set this evening.
Special Note: We’ve gone too far. We both decided at the start of this trip that we were going to target an average temperature of 70 F. The cold in Banff / Jasper has really been wearing on our spirits. When we packed for this trip we simply did not plan on near freezing temperatures. We are both excited to get down out of this altitude and back to normal September weather (really just warmer weather).