On Thursday, our legs were feeling a bit tired after the previous day’s hike, so we decided to just take a driving tour, instead of hiking. We only have a few photos to show this day.
We drove from Canmore up into Banff National Park on the Transcanada Highway, making our way to the slower and more scenic Icefields Parkway. Our first stop was at the Crowfoot Glacier Viewpoint. The glacier is visible at the left center of the image, to the right of the tops of the trees. Early explorers named the glacier “Crowfoot” after observing that it appeared to have three toes; sadly, one of those toes has since melted.
Crowfoot Mountain and Crowfoot Glacier
Crowfoot Glacier is just south of Bow Lake, and we continued north a short while, stopping for coffee at the gift shop of Simpson’s Num-Ti-Jah Lodge at the northern end of the lake.
Wildflowers at Simpson’s Num-Ti-Jah Lodge
Crowfoot Mountain from Num-Ti-Jah:
Crowfoot Mountain from Num-Ti-Jah
We drove a few more miles north, to Bow Summit, which at 2085 m (6840′) is the highest point on the Icefields Parkway. It is the watershed divide for the Bow River (to the south) and the Mistaya River (to the north). We walked along a paved trail for 1.2 km (0.7 miles) to an overlook of Peyto Lake, which has a turquoise color thanks to suspended rock particles. As noted for previous days, my photography was hampered by smoke from the forest fires in adjacent British Columbia.
Peyto Lake
Looking at the map, I see that there were a number of other viewpoints that I could have visited, and now I’m sorry that I didn’t stop at each one to take photos.
One that I had specifically wanted to visit was Mistaya Canyon, but as we drove by, we saw that a construction crew had closed the parking lot and was engaged in repaving or some other work. We didn’t see anyone parked along the road outside of the parking lot, so I don’t know if there was any other way to access the site.
We continued driving north, and our next stop was a viewpoint above the Big Bend, a climbing hairpin turn, where I took a photograph toward the south, showing the direction from which we had come:
Icefields Parkway from Big Bend
The same stop presented us with a view of Bridal Veil Falls, a 370 m (1,200′) waterfall, though the tallest drop is only 120 m (400′). It is also a fair distance from the road:
Bridal Veil Falls
We continued driving north, soon reaching Jasper National Park, where we stopped for lunch at the Icefields Centre.
We continued on to Tangle Falls, which is only 30 m (100′) tall, but easily seen, as it is adjacent to Icefields Parkway:
Tangle Falls
We then turned around and drove south. At one point, I looked in my rear view mirror and saw a black bear running across the highway behind me. On our last day in the area, we saw a deer from the car. These were the only large animals we saw in the area. This was in sharp contrast to Glacier National Park, where I saw a black bear, grizzly bears, a moose, bighorn sheep, and mountain goats.