5-8 August: From Lake Louise we drove north on the beautiful Icefield Parkway into Jasper National Park. Our “Old Fogeys Outing Club” group was able to find three unoccupied campsites next to each other in Wilcox campground near the Icefield visitor center. This campground is unserviced (no electric hookups) and first come, first served (no reservations available), but is conveniently located and has very attractive wooded sites. We hiked up the nearby Parker Ridge trail, which is a real gem. As we neared the top of the ridge, above treeline, Amy noticed small round whitish spots in the dark gray rocks and realized that they were fossils. Soon our whole group was intently picking up the rocks at our feet and finding them chock full of fossils of a wide variety of invertebrates (corals, bryozoans, worm tubes, bivalves, etc.). When we finally resumed our hike to the top of the ridge, we were rewarded with a panoramic view of mountains and glaciers, but the best view was yet to come. Heading back downhill past the fossil beds, we took a spur trail that led to a superb view of the Saskatchewan Glacier, which is not visible from the road. From this vantage point, we could see far up the valley occupied by this long glacier. Longitudinal rows of rock debris on the top of the glacier give a real sense of the movement of the ice down the valley. There was a small blue lake just below the toe of the glacier. The stream flowing from it is the source of the North Branch of the Saskatchewan River, which flows eventually into Hudson Bay and into the Atlantic.
The next morning, before heading up to the northern part of Jasper National Park, we took a couple of hikes and went to the Icefields Visitor Centre. The mountains on the west side of this valley hold the huge Columbian icefield, the source of glaciers whose meltwater flows into three of the world’s oceans, the Pacific, Atlantic, and Arctic. A trail right from our campground led up onto a ridge on the east side of the valley overlooking the Athabasca Glacier directly across from the Icefield Centre. When we got to the overlook, we discovered two bright red Adirondack-style chairs placed there by Parks Canada. The tradition of placing Red Chairs in a few special places in a Canadian national park started in Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland. We discovered a couple of them on our Newfoundland vacation in 2014 with Rob and Judith. At the Icefield Visitor Centre we viewed the park’s video and exhibits, then took the short walk across the road to a close view of the toe of the Athabasca Glacier. Signs along the path mark the toe’s position in various years since the early 1900s, when it reached the bottom of the valley, to today, where it has receded perhaps a mile during global warming. Walking on top of the glacier is restricted to guided tours because of the danger of falling into a crevasse. Just a few years ago a young boy strayed beyond the restraining ropes, fell into a crevasse, and died of hypothermia before rescuers could reach him.
