2012/07 Western Canada trip - Jasper`s falls/glaciers |
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Friday July 20th
We were off early on a cool and cloudy morning, leaving our lodger behind. He’d have to make a deal with whoever came in next. We were heading north, looking for a campsite a bit closer to the Jasper park’s attractions. Honeymoon Lake was my first choice, but the sites were rather dark and uninteresting.
Shortly after this we encountered yet another black bear, though this one didn’t hang around long enough for a good look. And just down the road we found these goats busy licking minerals at the side of the road. The parents seemed to be getting along but the kids were butting each other.
The next campsite was at Mount Kerkeslin, the last low-key campground before the giant ones around the town of Jasper. Most of the campsites were roped off as a bear was in residence, so we had to settle for a rather dark and buggy site, though at least it was on a river, this time the Athabasca.
We drove back to Sunwapta falls, which is really two falls for the price of one. The wide Sunwapta River splits around an island, roars down into 
a narrow canyon and explodes out of a narrow gap into a deeper wider canyon that leads to its conflence with the Athabasca. There’s only one good spot for viewing the second falls and only a few visitors even know it’s there. It was warmish in the parking lot but freezing on the viewing platforms; the river’s major source is the Columbia Icefield.
We drove back past our campsite, heading for Jasper’s other great waterfall, Athabasca Falls. We found another bear at the roadside, probably the same one that had been sighted in the campground. It was walking just behind the first row of shrubs and we photographers were keeping pace on the shoulder, but then the bear must have spotted a tasty plant and it came right out to join us. In my last shot it was too close for the lens to focus.
The birds are Clark’s nutcrackers, and the chick on the right was just as noisy as the one we had seen six weeks earlier at Bryce Canyon.
Athabasca Falls as always merits a look, even more so at high water. A side effect though was that some of the trails were closed and the beach below the falls was underwater. The access road to the falls runs parallel with the main highway, rougher and narrower, but much less traffic. It passes several lakes so I had hopes of a moose sighting, but we saw none
.
It took us to the junction that leads up to Mount Edith Cavell. The road up had just been resurfaced, but it had a length restriction of seven 
metres. We are right on that limit and we were just able to make the corners on the switchbacks, though I wouldn’t have liked to meet something else our size. The mountain was named after Nurse Edith Cavell, executed by the Germans in the First World War for helping British soldiers escape.
We took the trail up over the moraine with its great views of the Angel Glacier, spread across the mountain’s upper face. Down below is 
Cavell Lake, fed by both the Angel Glacier and the Ghost Glacier high on the far left. The lake is bordered by walls of ice and it is full of 
icebergs. It is possible to walk along part of the lake shore, but there were constant bangs and rumblings from above to remind us that those glaciers hanging off the mountain can only defy gravity for so long. This is another place where it’s hard to comprehend the scale of the scenery, so I’ve included pictures of the lake’s cliffs and the Angel’s feet.
[About three weeks later there were several large ice falls from the Ghost Glacier, some captured on YouTube. Then there was a massive one which hit the lake and blew it along the valley floor taking out the trail, toilets, and parking area. Luckily it happened in the early hours and no one was hurt. Twelve hours later there would been hundreds of people in its path.]
That evening Edna proclaimed the bear count to be sixteen. Their moose and porcupine counts remained at zero.