Today we put 484 km on the car and put in an 11 hour day that included going all the way to Jasper and back.

We left around 9:30 am and just outside the campground there was a young women hitchhiking on the side of the road. Her backpack was bigger then she was so we stopped to give her a ride. It turns out that she was on her way to the Icefields which is exactly where we were going. Her name is Patricia and she is from France. She said that she works for a couple of years and then travels for a year or two. She had arrived in Canada on the East coast and had been travelling across Canada. She is headed to Vancouver and she will fly out from there to go home.

It was pretty chilly when we arrived at the Columbia Icefields as you can tell from our clothing. Jack even had his heated coat on. At the Visitor Centre we boarded a regular bus which took us to the transfer station where we boarded the Ice Explorer to travel up onto the Icefield. There are 23 of these in the world and 22 of them are here in Banff/Jasper. The other one is in the Antarctic. Jake (Jacqueline) was our Ice Explorer driver and tour guide as well as being our singing entertainment. She is from Alberta and until recently she was the oldest female driver of the buses. She has 2 degrees in Science!

She was very informative about the bus and the glacier - and even added some signing and comedy to her stories. One of her songs was from Frozen.

The buses cost $1.3 Million each and one of them was just overhauled to have a Mercedes Benz motor put in at a cost of $800,000! They only inflate the tires to 13 - 15 psi so that they do not damage the ice and they are easier to drive.

The Columbia Icefield is receding and this causes concerns. This Icefield is actually on the Continental Divide so water from it goes to 3 oceans - the Pacific, the Arctic and the North Atlantic.

In Jasper, which looks like I image a European skiing village would look, we wandered through some gift shops, took a horse and buggy ride, saw a car show and had coffee and dessert at Smitty's.

In addition to Jasper and the Icefields we had several other stops today. We saw 3 pretty spectacular waterfalls, 2 different Black Bears, 2 Bighorn Sheep sunning themselves on a rock cliff, 4 Bighorn Sheep hanging out in a parking lot and tons of Mountain goats. When I spotted the first 2 Bighorn Sheep, Jack pulled over so that we could take pictures. As he got out of the truck he realized that right beside him were several Mountain goats including a little baby one. I think he almost hit the goat with the door of the truck.

Once again we saw people being foolish about approaching animals. The first black bear we saw was just on the other side of a ditch and people were actually going down into the ditch for a closer look. We snapped a couple of pictures - that aren't very good - and got out of there before someone made the bear very angry.