road trip 2022 - day 12 - to Revelstoke, then back home

 This is the second last day of the road trip. Tomorrow I leave Revelstoke for Vancouver.

Today I drove the Icefields Parkway, which is Highway 93 between Jasper and Banff. This is an incredibly beautiful drive with amazing views of mountains and glaciers the whole way. 

Before long I reached the Columbia Icefields. This is a famous tourist attraction. At the Icefield Center you can book tours that take you in vehicles onto the glacier. Quite expensive, though. There are a few tongues of the big icefield extending down valleys between the neighbouring mountains, but there is a very large one that extends farther down which is the most noticeable from the road, and this is the main attraction.

Around 1900 the glacier reached all the way to the highway, and has been receding since. It receding more rapidly, recently, about 5m per year. The receding glacier leaves a vast area of moraine in its wake. Also during the ice age the glacier carved this huge flat valley through with the road runs. Overall it's a very eerie landscape.

I drove down to a parking area from which you can walk a bit through the moraine get a closer view.

There are signs marking the extent of the glacier in different years. I was here in about 1977. Kind of weird to think that the spot where I'm standing now was covered in meters of ice at that time.

I continued down the Icefield Parkway, almost overwhelmed with the majesty of the mountains at every turn. Really, with such an array of high, rugged mountains so close on either side, I felt like I was in some kind of land of the giants. At the Saskatchewan River crossing the road drops steeply to a valley, offering more fantastic views.

I stopped at Mistaya Falls, a powerful waterfall where a river enters the Mistaya Canyon and carves very interesting rock formations. 

While beautiful, the highway was single lane and winding so there was no passing, so the traffic went very slowly. When I reached the Number 1 highway I turned west and made it to Revelstoke in good time. While in Revelstoke I stopped in a Rumpus Brewing for a beer and something to eat.

This is the last entry for the road trip. Tomorrow is a fairly long drive back to Vancouver.