Jasper National Park, July10

Woke up this morning and headed back up the Icefields Parkway. It was pretty cloudy but started clearing the closer we got to our turn around point yesterday. We watched an interesting film at the Columbia Icefield Interpretative Center and bought tickets to tour the glacier and go to the skywalk. David agreed to go on the skywalk with me, but we were a little disappointed that it was just over a canyon instead of over a glacier like I had thought. Overall we had a really good time on both. The bus drivers were well informed and entertaining, and we would recommend them to anyone coming this way. We are a little surprised that there aren’t many from the U.S. here but there are many from other countries! Lots of languages being spoken and, of course, everything is in English and French.

Uploading pictures for this post has been very frustrating. I'm on my third try and still can't get all the pics on. I'm going to try posting what I have and then see if it will let me go back and edit.

Nice to see some blue skies!

Banff has several of these "animal overpasses". There is so much car and train traffic though here that they have put tall fences on each side of the highway and built these overpasses (and some underpasses) to allow the animals to cross from one side to the other.

One of the many glaciers along the Icefield Parkway

I was able to capture the color of the lakes a little better today.

Clouds, mountains and the gates for closing the highway!

Bridal Veil Falls-seems that there are many across the world with that name.

These pics are of Anthabasca Glacier being fed from the Colombia Icefield. If you look closely at the picture above, the two dots to the left on the glacier are two ice buses. 

This is a straight shot (no zoom) from the visitor's center.

This is using my 30X zoom to see the buses.

And this is what they look like up close. There are supposedly only 23 of these and this company has 22 of them for the glacier tour here. The other one is in Antarctica an belongs to the US Geological Survey team.

We were sitting at the very back.

On the glacier. We have no idea who these kids are. I had just taken a picture of their family for them and the mom offered to take our pic. David invited the kids to join us. They are from Red Deer, AB so are relative locals. 

This is some of the glacier melt.