Since Svalbard, I’ve been even more interested than before in glaciers. While there aren’t tons of them tumbling into the sea in my neck of the woods, there are still pockets of them hanging out in the cirques and peaks of the US. My original plan for this summer was–on various pieces of road trip connecting me from here to there anyway–to find the little pieces of snowpack I could, in California, Oregon, Montana and Wyoming. But as inevitably happens, plans got more ambitious, more further-ranging, and I found my way up into British Columbia and Alberta.
Angel Glacier, Mt. Edith Cavell, Jasper NP, Alberta. The upper meadows where I walked to get this view were covered in blooming heather, another world.
Athabasca Glacier, Icefields Parkway, Jasper NP, Alberta. You can walk right up to the toe of this glacier–which is a much longer walk than it was thirteen years ago, as you can see from the sign in the foreground. There was another placemarker further back, put there in 1983, the year I was born, and others from earlier still, all the way back to the parking lot. The path up was often paved with large flat slabs of rock with hard straight scratchmarks stretching the length of them–where the glaciers had scored them before retreating.
Going-to-the-Sun Road, Glacier NP.
Somewhere along the road in far western BC.
