The Best of the Canadian Rockies Page 2 This
is the second page of our
September 2007 Tauck
tour of the Canadian Rockies. If you missed the first page,
click here. |
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| Above, Athabasca Falls which are fed by the Athabasca Glacier, which we visited later during our trip; and our first sighting of a Canadian Elk very near the Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge, our hotel for the next two nights. | ||||||
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| Our room was in a cabin-like building, and we had a view of the lake. | ||||||
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| The next day, which was a free day for us, turned out to be very cold and rainy. Above are pictures of the lodge building. I got bored by late morning, so I decided to go on a raft trip. It was raining, the air temperature was hovering around 40 degrees and the water was 38 degrees. I think it was the coldest and wettest thing I've ever done. The rapids weren't big at all, and the only danger was falling out of the raft and into the freezing cold water. | ||||||
| Above right, a view from one of the restaurants at the hotel. Below, Elk very close to the hotel. In the fall, it's not uncommon for elk to be seen actually in the hotel grounds. | ||||||
The
next morning turned out to be a clear day, and our ride to the Columbia Icefields
was spectacular. Everything was coated with a blanket of fresh snow. |
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Above right and below, Athabasca Glacier. The water from this glacier flows from the Columbia Icefield into the Atlantic, Pacific, and Artic Oceans. We were able to take a snowcoach ride on the glacier. The pictures below are of the visitors center. A bus takes you from the center to the snowcoach station across the road. |
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| Above right and below, our snowcoach. The pictures were taken on the glacier at the turnaround point. We were standing on a layer of ice that was well over a thousand feet thick. Some of our tour companions likened it to standing in a shopping center parking lot in Minnesota during the winter; but to us Southern Californians, it was a pretty neat experience. The total ride on the snowcoach took about an hour. | ||||||
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The
ride on the glacier was really cold, but fun. We continued to our last
stop on the tour, Banff. Our tour started in Calgary, drove down the icefields
Parkway to Jasper, and then turned around and drove back to Banff
for the last two nights before returning us to the Calgary Airport. Click
on the link below to see the pictures of Banff. |
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