The ice parkway.. AMAZING

For the first time we actually did start early, not that it helped. As we left the campground the driver wheel was making a grating sound with each revolution. Inspection didn't reveal anything. We rang the company from the carpark at Lake Louise Community. They were busy and vowed to ring us back. A coffee later and we had lost 45mins and they hadn't rung. We decided to push on and monitor the problem. Within about 5km the sound was definitely much diminished and soon it was completely gone.

We missed the turnoff for the Ice Parkway and lost another 20mins. Mary had a not-very-happy-attack as we lamented the lost opportunity.. the weather was perfect: blue skies and sunny. The drive should be glorious. It was as it turned out. I was really thankful we had the GoPro set up, and we actually set it to take a picture every 5 seconds through the front windscreen. I kid you not, many of these photos will be wonderful to look back on.

Words can do little to describe the beauty of this drive, so I will let pictures do it.

Believe it or not, that's a black bear

Peyto Lake

Bingo- nearly a full house of Cruise Canada RVs

Mistaya Falls

Mistaya Canyon 

The weeping wall from afar

By lunchtime we had reached the Centre at the Columbian Icefields. Mary and W headed out onto the glacier while V and I enjoyed a cafe meal and reading in the van.

Yep, that's a glacier

Yep, that's a glacier too.

The Ice Parkway Centre is popular

Mary and w returned from their glacier expedition spouting superlatives such as "OK" and "interesting". Apparently there was a lot of waiting around but the highlight for Mary was the vehicle they travelled in onto the glacier : it navigated a 32 degree slope downwards which was quite a thrill!

V and I had enjoyed our cafe meal; myself more than V unfortunately as her vegetarian noodles were more noodle than vegetarian, and a bit greasy at that. My beef pie and green salad was excellent. Once fed, we returned to the van and I did some blogging. We still were cut off from the www and W was starting to get withdrawal symptoms (so was I, I confess).

After the return of the glacial ones we departed again. The scenery remained spectacular, but there's only so much ooohing and aahing you can do in a day and we actually sped past a few sights, saying "should we stop?"..... "no, we all saw it didn't we?"

One place we are really glad we stopped for though was Athabasca Falls, an incredibly impressive display of the immense power of a whole river in semi flood forced over narrow falls then into a very narrow gorge. Thunderous, powerful, blasting, reverberating forces of nature!

There are two roads to Jasper from here. We took the back road as recommended by Lonely Planet. This was a good recommendation as the road was lovely. It is sealed, but not maintained as well as the main highway so the first 8 km are a bit bumpy, but the solitude is worth it after the high traffic of the main highway through the ice fields. It was getting late and we were undecided about whether to stay in Jasper or to move on. We hadn't paid for another night in the National Park and we were a bit keen to keep moving and use any gained time on Vancouver Island, but this had been a big day and Mary was tired. Once we saw Jasper the decision was made: not to our liking and nowhere near as picturesque as Banff. It really isn't Jasper's fault; it's just that a broad windswept valley and a shopping strip on one side without any counterpoint on the other (on account of the railway line and lake) doesn't provide the sense of welcome that Banff does. I think it's the lack of an actual centre that makes the difference; no definite centre, no feeling of heart.

So we pushed on. Our destination was Mount Robson, as we had seen in our guide that there were a couple of RV parks. It was only 80km away and out of the National Park. 

A beautiful view approaching dusk

Looking for a place to stay on the road in Canada? There's an app for that! Well not exactly, but the free app simply called "Canada" has free downloadable contour maps and although it is only for iPhone, the maps are more than adequate on the iPad. I thoroughly recommend this for anyone traveling in Canada. Some preparation is required though.. The maps are not built in to the app; you basically have to download them individually and as they are 1:50,000 our trip involved several hours of downloading prior to leaving Australia and another couple of hours from our apartment in Vancouver. The point of all of this was that this app also showed a tantalizing symbol on the exit side of town..

This symbol indicated a campsite and on investigation, four travel weary road hardened late arrivalists discovered their Shangri-la; a lovely campsite hidden in a tall pine forest. If not for the density of mosquitoes, it would be perfect! Mosquitoes, by the way are worth a mention. If you are traveling in Canada in Summer be warned. You will find water everywhere and that means you will also find mosquitoes everywhere. We had paid extra for outdoor chairs. I think the locals must hire these as a bit of a practical joke. There's no way I am sitting out on them. It would be equivalent to painting a target on your back and sitting in a deck chair on a rifle range.

Nestled in the pines we had a late dinner and collapsed into bed to sleep soundly.