Day 2 on the Icefields Parkway - Athabasca Glacier, Sunwapta Falls & Athabasca Falls

Saskatchewan Crossing service station parking lot provided us a great nights sleep. Would definitely recommend. We had to set off at 9am so had a quick cereal breakfast before once again travelling north on the Icefields Parkway. Stopping off at a couple of viewpoints along the road I realised that we’re becoming a bit immune to the beauty of Canada. Everywhere is just so beautiful that it’s all blending in to one stunning blur. Arriving back in London is going to be a shock (in 5 and a half months time, so not too bad). Driving towards the Athabasca glacier it gradually got colder and windier, to the stage that it was relatively difficult to keep Kevin on the road as his high sides were essentially sails in the very very strong crosswind. Safely(ish) arriving there, the snow (it was snowing, like usual) wasn’t falling, it was flying in a dense, horizontal line from left to right. Parking up at the base of the glacier we had a short walk to its actual edge. Although a short walk it was directly into a headwind which made it near on impossible to actually see, I wrapped my neck wrap around my entire face in an attempt to stop the icy wind killing me. It actually was t particularly impressive as we were in a cloud at this point, but the power of the freezing wind was pretty incredible (unfortunately not captured in photos). There’s signs at the glacier which show where it reached in the last hundred years, which leaves a slightly sad tinge to the experience. 

Moving on to slightly warmer climes we made it to the Sunwapta Falls, a pleasant set of waterfalls in Jasper National park. Amelia boldly stated that these are her favourite waterfalls of Canada thus far, better than the 2nd and 3rd highest in the whole of Canada. They’re nice, and included a short 2km (or 1.3km depending on which sign you read) walk to the Lower Sunwapta Falls during which we picked up a worried Frenchman with the safe allure of our bear bell. He did rather shock us by appearing out of the blue while Amelia was setting up an obscure video of the tree tops swaying in the wind. He recommended Athabasca Falls as a better waterfall for us to visit on our route up to Jasper, so we took the advice and headed there afterwards. 

In my opinion he was wrong, Sunwapta beats Athabasca all day, they’re just a little more touristy and slightly less ‘untouched’. It didn’t help that a bus load of tourists arrived shortly after we got out of the van (I say ‘tourist’ despairingly as if we aren’t in that category...). We lunched after wandering around the various viewpoints and, satisfyingly, the heavens opened while we were inside. 

Having worried about not having enough time to see everything we wanted, we’d ended up seeing it all before lunch, the upside to not doing an epic hike first thing in the morning I guess. Therefore we took a detour to visit Cavell Lake. My advice would be to only go when it’s a sunny day, and not in a camper van. The 14km road is narrow, made even narrower by overgrown foliage which noisily hits the side of the van (sorry Kevin) every time I actually drove within the white lines. The lake was average at best. Not high on the effort - reward ratio. At all. 

Tonight we’re not staying in the camper as it’s meant to reach -14 degrees and we’re not hopeful on our chances of surviving that, even with all our thermal gear on and 2 blankets. So we’re headed to a hostel. Before that we’ve got to get rid of all the water  from the van so headed to a sani dump which is conveniently (again unplanned, there’s things have really gone well for us so far) located 3 minutes around the corner from the hostel. Hopefully we’re going to have a brilliant night sleep in an actual bed without the threat of falling or hitting our heads.