Canada: July 2011

Of course we had to hike up on to the glacier. It ended up sort of funny. We were all geared up for riding in fairly cool weather, so when we got up on the glacier, where the wind was really blowing, we were dressed quite appropriately. Everything but the helmet and that actually would have been nice because that wind roaring down the ice was COLD!

Another interesting thing is that the glacier has this constant curving slope so it makes you think you're about to reach the "top", but it never levels off. At some point you just decide to stop. I stopped before the other guys because my knee was starting to give me warning messages (I had surgery on it earlier in the year). So I took pictures of them and they took pictures of me.

As you can see from the pictures, the glacier top is actually pretty dirty. But the rivulets of water were clean and the water going down was as clear as could be. I should have tasted it, but not knowing more about what goes on on the glacier I decided not too. But I can tell you that water is pretty cold.

One more glacier note before we leave. See the picture to the right? That is a large boulder that was scraped clean by the glacier over the centuries. It's about 10-15 feet in diameter and while not perfectly flat, it's pretty dang smooth. The scratches are left from the glacier as it moved. There were several of these large scraped off rocks at the bottom of the glacier that we had to hike over to get to the glacier. This is probably a wonderful place for a geologist. Even not being one it was very interesting.

If you go, be sure to take note of the markers that show where the glacier was at different times. We ate another over-priced lunch at the Icefields Centre just across the highway from the glacier. There's a marker up there from 1877 I believe. Pretty wild. Anyways, we ate lunch, looked at souveniers, and then mounted up and took off south again.

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