Up Close and Personal with Athabasca Glacier

This may be the closest to an Antarctic landscape that one can visit and photograph, without actually going to Antarctica.

It has so many elements befitting the most exotic of expeditions. Crystal clear glacial water carving deep blue streaks through a barren, lifeless world. Incredible blue caves born within virgin ice deposits untouched for millenia. Bottomless crevasses waiting to devour the inexperienced (or unequipped). The only things missing are a few penguins, or perhaps an old Roald Amundsen camp.

But no, it's only the Canadian Rockies ... no more than a couple kilometres from the highway in fact.



The Athabasca Glacier is one of the major attractions of the Jasper National Park, and is one of the most accessible glaciers in the world. It's so easily accessible that a visitor centre has been built across from it, next to the highway connecting Banff and Jasper.

Half a million visitors every year would admire the glacier from the comfort of the visitor centre's viewing deck, several hundred metres away. Those who desire to see it up close would typically board a giant Snowcoach to a mechanically flattened, carefully manicured parking area in the middle of the icefield. This makes the icefield safe, sterilized and accessible to virtually anyone, but it also shields the visitor from the natural ruggedness of the ice formation, the chutes and crevasses, and the icy blue creeks.



The raw beauty of the glacier is normally reserved for experienced mountaineers -- numerous deaths have resulted from unsuspecting visitors falling into crevasses and sinkholes, and Parks Canada discourages going across the safety barriers at all. For inactive 9-to-5 office people like myself, the only (relatively) safe way is to join an ice walking tour led by experienced guides.



We joined a small-group tour organized by Athabasca Glacier Icewalks, taking us up the lower third of the glacier on a 3-hour hike. We booked two months ahead online, but the tour is also bookable at the visitor centre if spaces remain available. More than 20 people showed up when we visited in mid July, and the group was split between two guides to keep group sizes manageable and participants safe.



Arriving at the height of summer (both Vancouver and Calgary hit 30 degrees Celsius that week) we greatly under-estimated the bone-chilling cold of the Rockies, even in July. I showed up in a flimsy windbreaker, jeans, light walking shoes, and my wife wasn't any better equipped. Luckily all necessary clothing and equipment were provided by our guides, including 3-in-1 waterproof jackets, waterproof pants, waterproof hiking boots of various sizes, fleece toques and gloves, but most importantly, crampons to provide traction on the ice surface.



The 300 metres or so of elevation that we gained in our 3 hour hike was much slower than I anticipated, not because of any extraordinary physical demands or steepness of grade, but because of the slipperiness of the surface. As we zigzagged our way up the glacier, every step was taken with the apprehensiveness of treading through an enormous uphill skating rink with winding creeks and bottomless abysses.



The 6km long Athabasca is only one of the many glaciers flowing out from the 300km2 Columbia Icefield, situated on top of the continental divide of the North American continent. The icefield is claimed to be one of the hydrological apexes of the North American continent, meaning that ... and I did NOT personally attempt this ... if you take a piss at the top of the icefield, your fluid would possibly split and drain into the Pacific Ocean, the Arctic Ocean, and the Hudson Bay.



At the midpoint of our hike we came across one of the metal poles pounded vertically into the ice sheet by scientists to measure the movement and health of the glacier. At the beginning of the tour we learned that the glacier had already retreated 1.5km over the past century, but it was only a trivial piece of statistics ... until we witnessed the evidence first hand. A thickness of 3 metres had already melted between April and our visit in July, and even more would dissipate before the start of winter.



That's the cold reality facing every visitor in this age of global warming. The Athabasca Glacier is currently retreating at a rate of 10 metres per year and accelerating. Some alarmists even go as far as predicting its complete disappearance within the next century, though not every scientist agrees. The only thing we know for certain is that by the time of our next visit, whether it will be next year or after several decades, the mighty glacier will be a smaller remnant of its current self.



Visiting the Athabasca Glacier was one of those rare, deeply haunting experiences for me as a traveler. Do I absolutely need to take long flights to faraway destinations every year? What will be my own carbon footprint in my lifetime, and how much of that will contribute to glaciation shrinkage in the Rockies, the submersion of the Maldives, or the breakup of the Bering Sea ice packs?

These questions are too heavy for a lazy midsummer roadtrip, yet it pains me as a Canadian that one of our great natural treasures may not even last the entire 21st century. I seriously debated whether I should even promote the Athabasca Glacier as a tourist destination here, but arrived at the conclusion of yes -- if only to heighten each visitor's awareness of his or her own carbon footprint. Perhaps our glacier will breath just a little easier with each carpool trip we take, until we as a human race can find a solution to global warming.