Today, I stood on an icefield composed of snow and layers of ice that have been in the Canadian Rockies since the last Ice Age. Weird, unearthly blue glaciers seemed to be slowly pushing their way through the enormous, sheer mountains all around me on the Columbia Icefield near Jasper.
The color white was all around me in the sky, the ground and the mammoth mountains reaching to the heavens. Between the two tallest peaks was the granddaddy of the nearby glaciers called the Athabasca Glacier. The largest glacier in the Columbia Icefield, the glacier looked like water had been released from a giant dam, came rushing upon the icefield’s expansive valley, and then froze in its tracks.
I stood for a long time staring at all sides of me and trying to memorize the unbelievably majestic scene. I half expected angels to descend from the clouds and start singing the Hallelujah Chorus.
For the first time in my life, I found myself thankful for snow in April. Though there is still an exceptional amount of snow during the peak summer months, there is not the covering of white as far as the eye can see.
All along the Icefields Parkway from Jasper to Lake Louise, this scenery was one silent vista blanked in beautiful snow after another. Bighorn sheep and elk sightings were the only proof that life other than dark green evergreens could exists in the white world.
A far away view of the Columbia Icefield and glaciers
Proof that I stood on an icefield
Bighorn sheep sighting
An older model of the coaches used to take visitors to the icefield
