Day 15 - Reparations Down The Icefield Parkway

When we started planning this holiday we saw there were opportunities to go back and do things in the Rockies that we'd not had time to do in 2008, and re-do things which hadn't worked out as we'd wanted them to. The Jasper Tramway experience yesterday was one of the former. Our visits to Peyto Lake and the Columbia Icefield were examples of the latter.

Today, July 10th, was two years ago to the very day that we set off from Canmore to Jasper up the Icefield Parkway. That was a day of adventure which involved an unscheduled stop at Field, British Columbia, a visit to Peyto Lake which was snowed off, a visit to the Athabasca Glacier which was equally as snowy and, though amazing in itself, not quite what we wanted, and finally an unexpected but totally welcome encounter with a black bear.

Today we intended to recreate some of that journey, but this time in reverse, starting in Jasper, travelling down the Icefield Parkway, and ending up, totally scheduled, at Field, British Columbia. We wanted to re-visit both the Athabasca Glacier and Peyto Lake without the snow.

Would the weather hold for us this year?

Unfortunately, as we checked out of our hotel in Jasper, the weather didn't look too good. It was raining as we got onto Highway 93 south, and the forecast for the Columbia Icefields was more rain and also thunder.

Doggedly, we pushed on. What else could we do?

We stopped at a booth, bought a day-pass to the Jasper National Park, and entered the Icefield Parkway with the windscreen wipers going and Doves playing on the stereo (yesterday in Jasper I'd bought a mini-jack to mini-jack lead so that I could plug my MP3 player into His Majesty; part of my unredeemed nature wants to take a photo of my naked bum and upload it onto the car's hard drive for use as a backdrop on the LCD screen).

Along with the day-pass, they supplied a map, so now Sandra was navigating. Regular readers of this blog will know that my darling wife has many amazing qualities, but her ability to read a map is not one of them. "That'll be Honeymoon Lake," she said proudly, pointing, in the wrong direction, to a bend in the Athabasca River (or, as she calls it, the Alabaster River). When a signpost for Honeymoon Lake showed up 12km later, she wisely kept quiet.

I believe everyone should drive down the Icefield Parkway at least once during their life. The Rockies there are almost indescribable. The individual mountains are huge, enormous, great slabs of rock stretching up into the sky; ash-coloured, snow-capped, they stand impassive either side of the tiny road that threads through them. They look broken, jagged, new, whatever new means geologically. I swear that if you brought warmongers here and drove them down the Icefield Parkway, the world would be a more peaceful place.

The rain stopped, though there were still torn clouds around the peaks of the mountains, adding to the atmosphere of the journey. Then suddenly, rounding a bend, the great Columbia Icefield hove into view, the Athabasca Glacier on the right-hand side of the road and the Visitor Centre on the left. We parked up, and looked over at that great sheet of ice. No clouds. No snow. Warmer than 2008. Do we go for it?

We went for it.

Tickets purchased, we didn't have to wait long before we were being transported in one of the enormous Icefield Explorer vehicles up the glacier. The patter from the excellently informed driver was familiar, but all we wanted was the glacier experience without the snow-storm. And thankfully we got it. No blue skies - like a killer whale jumping out of the water, that's an exception rather than the rule - but we did have amazingly clear views of either side of the glacier, and the interior, where it joins up with the rest of the Columbia Icefield. One of the advertising blurbs for this trip says, "stand on ice as thick as the Eiffel Tower is tall"... kind of makes you shiver, and not because of the cold.

Somehow in the thirty minutes we had allotted to explore (not that you can do much exploring, it's too dangerous a place for jay-walking), we got talking to a mother and her daughter, also from England, who had been travelling around BC and Alberta.

"We're staying with friends of ours in Samlon Arm."
"Where?"
"Samlon Arm."
"Don't you mean Salmon Arm?"
"Well our friends have lived there for years, and they call it Samlon Arm."

I think either their friends are taking the mickey out of them, or the people of Salmon Arm are taking the mickey out of their friends. You decide.

Pleased that we'd seen the Glacier in most of its glory, we ate lunch in the carpark of the visitor centre, then headed off to Peyto Lake. It was another hour before we got there, and it was quite a strange and funny experience to pull into the carpark that, last time we'd been there, looked like a winter wonderland. Now, with the sun breaking through the clouds, it looked like a completely different place.

The walk up to the Peyto Lake viewpoint is only a short one, pine-scented and pretty. But it does nothing to prepare you for the view that awaits you. You step out onto a wooden platform, and an eye-stretching panorama greets you. To the left is Peyto Glacier, which basically melts and runs into an enormous basin, forming a lake with the characteristic turquoise colour we've come to expect from lakes in the Rockies. In the centre and to the right, the lake itself splays out like an enormous topaz; the Rocky Mountains and the Mistaya River Canyon, into which the lake drains, stretch out as far as the eye can see. What would this view have been like on a snowy day two years ago? I've no idea, but it was staggering today.

Suitably humbled, we made our way back to HM, only our rendezvous with my mates Jeff or Matt and the "BC RoadCam Challenge" left on our agenda. As we pulled out of the Peyto Lake parking lot, I asked my navigator how much further we had to go before the turn off for Field.

"Two inches," came the reply.

Roadside car gaggles - we saw a few in 2008, and we'd seen a couple already today. They usually mean some kind of wildlife. At one a woman was holding her hands to her head in an obscure mime, helpfully mouthing "deer"... we drove on. At another we saw nothing, and didn't even know what people were looking for.

And now, here, another. I sighed. A bear, perhaps? Done that. An elk? Big whoopah. A deer? Yawn. But then, over to the left... a thing of limbs and joints, dirty grey, huge and with a head half the size of its body... "It's a moose!" I cried, indicating frantically, slowing down barely safely, pulling HM into the side of the road. The moose angled its way up the side of the embankment opposite, as ungainly as Peter Crouch going for goal. It chomped at a few leaves, oblivious to the attention it was drawing. It was a female, missing the characteristic antlers of the male, and as such only stood about 6 feet tall at the shoulder, and weighed only about 40 stone. I've rarely seen an animal so ugly that brought me so much joy.

At last we pulled into the information centre at Field, where we'd stopped for a pee-break two years earlier. I positioned HM in such a place where, if Jeff or Matt had managed to stay up late enough in England, then they would be able to pick him up in a roadcam picture. After a suitable wait, and with directions from the information centre, we made our way to our ninth hotel, The Kicking Horse Lodge.

Field has a population of about 300 people. I was expecting a meal tonight of burgers or pizza. Let me introduce you to Truffle Pigs Bistro, associated to The Kicking Horse Lodge. The place was rammed. We had to wait 45 minutes for a table. People come from all over to eat at this restaurant.

Ourselves, we ate in splendour, by a country mile the best meal we've eaten in Canada on this holiday or the last. And the wine, from the Okanagan Valley, which we shall be visiting in a few days, was just superb.

I really don't want this holiday to end.