We started our third full day bright and early and headed towards Jasper, the furthest north of the parks we planned to visit.

Jasper, the largest of all the National Parks in Canada, famous for it’s glaciers was gorgeous. It was covered in snow which continued to fall heavily as we drove along the Icefields Parkway.

Our first stop was Crowfoot Glacier, where we encountered a very knowledgable  photographer with the largest camera lens I’ve ever seen who was scanning for bears! Gulp.

Crowfoot Glacier certainly lived up to it’s name, beautiful blue ice in the shape of..you guessed it, a crows foot!

We continued our trek along the ice fields parkway and stopped next at Bow Lake.

The scenery along the parkway was stunning and we found ourselves stopping often for photo ops.

Our next stop was a short hike to Glacier Lake.

Gorgeous. Are you sensing a pattern here?

Our final stop for the day was the Athabasca Glacier. The glacier is one of six “toes” of the Columbia Icefield. Typically, you can hop on a snow coach and get a ride right up to the foot of the glacier to walk around on it. Unfortunately, we were about a week early for the Icefields Center and thus the coaches to be open.

We decided to hike out as far as we could, taking our time and being extra careful not to fall into a snow covered crevice.

 

 

The blue ice of the glacier was visible as we began our hike but was covered by an incoming snow storm by the time we made it to the top.

The sun was setting as we hiked back to our car so we made our way back to Golden and headed back to the Wolf’s Den for another round of delicious elk burgers, ready to tackle Glacier National Park in the morning!