Sunday 7th June 2009 and a visit to the Icefields. Canada has experienced four major Ice ages. The Athabasca Glacier and the Columbia Icefield once formed part of an enormous ice sheet that ground and carved the landscape we see here today in the Rocky Mountains. At one time the Athabasca Glacier flowed north to the present site of Jasper and joining other glaciers moved east to the prairies and south past Calgory. Its journey of hundreds of kilometres took many centuries. The most recent Ice Age ended some 10,000 years ago. 

The Athabasca Glacier is gradually flowing downhill from the Columbia Icefield. The ice within its glacier moves at different speeds, similar to flows within a river. Ice layers at the bottom of the glacier are under intense pressure and become plastic, able to flow over bedrock irregularities without breaking or cracking. The upper layers tend to be more brittle, cracking open into crevasses when subject to stress. As the glacier flows downhill it carries a tremendous amount of rock and debris with it. The glacier transports this material down the valley and deposits ir alongside as moraines. The Athabasca glacier covers an area of 2.5 sq.miles; it is 3.75 miles in length and has a depth of 1,000ft. Due to climate change the glacier is receding by 80ft a year. 

We took a tour of the icefields in one of the snow coaches. Vehicle rides on the glacier actually began in 1952 when a gentleman named Bill Ruddy amassed a fleet of 14 snowmobiles. Brewsters Transportation acquires Ruddy’s operations in 1969 and replaced the snowmobiles with various hybrid vehicles, culminating in the snowcoach, a 56 passenger, all-terrain vehicle that has been in use since 1981.