Wow! Awesome! Fantastic! Lake Louise to Wilcox Creek on the Columbia Icefields

How many times can you say Wow! in a day?!

After an indifferent start to the day, with rain in the night, we set off on the first part of the Icefields Parkway drive. We had every kind of weather, as you will see, and stopped many times to take in the view.

First stop Hector lake

And the view back down the road.

Then on to Crowfoot Glacier and Bow Lake, where we made ourselves a coffee

Bow Lake

The next port of call was Peyto Lake considered to be one of the highlights of this drive. We arrived in the car park in a light snow storm, after donning down jackets, hats and gloves, we walked up to the main viewing deck, along with a few others. The path was uphill, but had a good surface, however the decking was snowy and icy! Here we got our first view, but there was low cloud on the mountains. We waited for it to lift and then went for a loop walk, then out on a smaller path to a fantastic viewpoint at about 7,000 ft, away from the crowds.

Peyto Lake

The view looking away from the lake

We spent about an hour there, then moved on to Waterfowls lakes where we parked up and made a soup and sandwich lunch. 

....with more fantastic views.

On we drove to  visit the Mistaya Canyon which must be the narrowest gorge I have seen, the water suddenly dropped away, it was really spectacular, and very difficult to photograph!!

  The road then took us to The Crossing and the first sight of the Saskatchewan river. From here we crossed the river flats with some lovely autumn(fall) colours. The road from The Crossing was quite bumpy as the road is concrete and laid in strips, so we rattled our way along! 

River flats

Coleman Creek

The road then began to climb again passing a massive rock face known as the Weeping Wall and then a huge hairpin bend, rightly known as Big Bend.

Looking back down from the Big Bend viewpoint

From here it was a short distance to the Wilcox Creek campground. We had a quick look then drove a couple of km to the Icefields Centre, but the car park was full of coaches so we left that until the morning. However we did get our first view of the massive Athabasca Glacier, and hopefully, I will have a good phot on the next blog.

Meanwhile we returned to Wilcox Creek and after much driving around on a steep narrow track we settled on the first site we had seen!!! As usual the campground is in forest, so the views are limited.  We are at just over 6,500ft, so it could be quite chilly tonight! 

Total km 130. Left Lake Louise at 10.15, parked up at 4.30pm

An amazing day, with great contrasts in terms of weather and scenery! The van chugged a bit up some of the long hills, but otherwise rolled along well!