On the Road-Jasper Alberta

August 31, 2009

Mount Edith Cavell and Angel Glacier

We left before 8:00 a.m. to start down Icefield Parkway a bit to reach the entrance to Mt. Edith Cavell. Actually we had thought that it was 7:00 because we had not noticed that the time had changed to Rocky Mountain Time. The road up to the trail head was windy and seemed to take forever to reach a parking area for our walk. It was close to 5000 feet above sea level. Our first walk led us up and very close to this mountain. It is named for a British nurse who was executed during WWII for helping prisoners of war in Belguim escape. The walk out to the glacier pond and the visions of what is left of the glacier took about an hour. On the way we saw several different ground squirrels and a full grown Marmut stuffing himself with a large bunch of grass. We also some evergreens that had were apparently in a fire and the bottom half of these trees is burned black and the tops are green. We also saw instances of new vegetation peeking up through Rocky(where landslides carried down rock) or burned out areas. I expected it to be very cold by the glacier but it was warm. This glacier and many others in North America formed about 400 years ago during a mini ice age. In 1951 there was still enough of the glacier that snow covered some of the area that were clear for walking today. water runs down the steep mountain as the glacier melts. Angel Pond is the result of melting glacier water running down and pieces of the glacier breaking off and falling into the pond. While we were there, a piece of the glacier right above the pond kept calving and dropping ice into the pond with a big splash which reverberated through the woods like the sound of a gunshot or firecrackers.

The second walk that we took went up much higher and showed us higher views of the mountain and the landscape up there was more meadows with wildflowers as well as the evergreens. On the walk down from this second hike, we walked with this woman that had gone to library school about the same time that I did and we got to talk about the changes that were going on for libraries.

After our hiking we went to the Post Office to mail some souvenirs off to the kids and I was surprised to be handed customs sheets to be filled out for each package.