Jasper National Park

 Jasper National Park, Banff and Yoho National Park are really all one big national park.  We drove from Edmonton west to Hinton, Alberta and began at the north end.  The scenery was unbelievably beautiful.  We ran out of adjectives.  Maybe our only disappointment was in not seeing more wildlife, but the parks are so vast that you probably just need to know where to look.  Linda's son-in-law had been a tour guide in the parks for several years and gave us a wonderful little write-up of some highlights to see.  We were able to see and do most of the things he suggested.

 If you click on this to enlarge it and then look closely, you will see a bunch of mountain goats.  We saw them just after entering Jasper.

 These guys along the roadside were pretty tame.

 Our first stop in Jasper was at Maligne Lake.  Everything was so vast, majestic, and blue and green.

 Dennis in front of Maligne Lake with the majestic Canadian Rockies behind him.  The little dots in the back of the lakes are canoers.  The weather was mostly perfect.

 Every bend in the road was a photo op!

 This area was called Maligne Canyon, where the river flows down to the Athabasca River from Maligne Lake.  It was thunderous and fascinating.  You can see how the water has carved away (and is still carving away) the rock.

 Another view of the canyon and waterfalls cascading down.

 These waterfalls were another scenic stop and are called the Athabasca Falls.  The river is a very milky color because of the glaciers that feed it.  As the glaciers grind on the rocks, they pulverize them into almost a dust they called rock flour.  It makes the water a strange milky color.

 Another view of the beautiful Athabasca Falls.

 One of the many, many glaciers.

 These huge glaciers are part of what they call the Columbia Icefields, a vast expense of snow and ice high in the Rockies which melts all summer and feeds the rivers and waterfalls and gets added upon all winter with the snow.

We took a tour of the glacier in the bus below.  It drives right up on the snow and you get out (with all the hundreds of other tourists) and walk around carefully and take pictures before they take you back down the hill.  Our guide told us that the ice where we were standing was about 1000 feet deep.

 

 One of the many glaciers and waterfalls flowing down to where we were standing.  The ice is always melting when its warm, so there were little streams flowing through and under the glaciers.

 Just to give you some idea of the thickness of the snow.

 Mostly we didn't need jackets on the trip, but it was a little cool up there.  I can't remember how many miles our guide told us that the ice field stretched behind us.

A view of the scenery as we drove through the mountains south toward Banff.  I don't know how many miles it was, but it took us all day to drive from the little town of Jasper on the north end to Banff on the south end, with scenic stops along the way.  The road was a terrific four-lane highway in excellent condition and wasn't a bit scary---unlike Going-to-the-Sun Highway in Glacier National Park.