Rocky Mountain Road Trip day 3

I had reserved the first flight up Whistlers mountain Jasper sky tram at 8am. Ambitious with 3 jet-lagged teens, but we did it! It was overcast and very windy. 

The upper sky tram station

 

Athabasca river

Immediately after the upper station for the sky tram, there was a pile of snow. David was amazed at snow in mid-July and plunged their hand in straight away. 

We started the ~2km climb to the summit of the mountain. The change in elevation had all of us, even the teenagers, huffing and puffing. The wind was super strong and really bothered Lucas's ears necessitating a few rest breaks along the way. No one complained about the extra rest stops. 

To get to the summit, we had to traverse about 20-30 metres of residual snow. 

The wind that was super strong on the hike up to the summit felt hurricane strength at the top! It felt like we would be blown right off the top. I was nervous to bring my phone out for photos and felt certain my hat would fly down the mountain. Lucas sought refuge on the lee-side of the cairn marking the mountain summit. 

 

We lured him out for a family group shot. This was the most wild mountain top experience of the entire trip! 

All of the group shots at the summit had David's hair covering their face.

On the way back down to the sky tram we took a side loop and Chris spotted our first marmot of the trip. I was happy we managed to go up first thing in the morning. True to the reviews online, it was much more crowded as the day progressed. We went back to the campsite for lunch and a little rest. While I didn't have the entire Icefields Parkway in our itinerary, we did get one hike down the road in that afternoon. It was a crazy, twisty road up to Mount Edith Cavell. 

It hadn't occurred to me when planning this trip that mid-July would still be too "early" in the season to do all the hikes I was hoping for. There is a hike up along the edge of the basin that leads to an alpine meadow. The meadow portion was closed as the ecological area was still vulnerable after the snow melt. As we sat on rocks looking in to the basin, it took several minutes for the scale of the basin to come in to focus. Once I pointed out that the ant like beings at the side of the glacial lake were actually full grown humans, our perch seemed much more precarious. 

Big glacier, occasional avalanches were seen.

Glacier lake, filled with ice floes. To the side, you can see the people in the basin. Perspective was really difficult in the mountains!

We then hiked down to the edge of the ice floe filled lake, checking out the large chunks of snow and watching for the occasional avalanche. We spotted an almost cartoon-like circular snow ball hanging like a sword of Damocles at the top of the glacier. When it falls, it will bring a lot of snow and ice with it and tourists will need to be fairly fleet footed to get out of the way. 

I was checking out the interesting microbial growth at the side of the lake, wondering if I should take a sample for our friend Tim. He assures me his days of slime collection are over, but can you ever really leave that passion behind?

In addition to climbing on every boulder we passed, David also enjoyed climbing on snow.

Just a little snowball

You can see the waterfalls coming off the melting snow and glacier behind the sibling love
.

     

If you zoom in at the top of the glacier you can see the round snowball ready to plummet down the mountain. We took turns checking it out with the binoculars. 

After a perfect first day of hikes, we wandered through downtown Jasper looking for a place to have dinner. We opted for a nice pizza place before checking out a local ice cream store. We enjoyed our cones while sitting in a park across from the train tracks, watching the trains go by.

 

We had a nice campfire and turned in for our last night in the o'Tentik.