Chowhound = best invention ever. After our great dinner at Truffle Pigs two nights ago, and our more-than-serviceable meal last night at the Moraine Lake Lodge, tonight we hit a Jasper restaurant recommended by the website: Tekarra. It was even better than we expected; Nellie’s brie appetizer was too much for her to handle, and her main — artic char — was good too. My main sounded bizarre — banana-crusted chicken breast — but it was one of the best things I’ve eaten in months. For dessert we split a giant chocolate sundae. Oy.

But first things first: the trip here! We left Moraine Lake behind — they were literally hours away from closing up for the season — and drove through Lake Louise to the northbound Icefields Parkway. It’s about 230 km all told, but usually takes people the better part of a day because of all the sights along the way. There was no single sight on the trip to rival Lake O’Hara or Lake Oesa — though Peyto Lake came close — but there was a barrage of amazing mountain after gorgeous lake after incredible glacier after stunning valley…and on and on and on. Hector Lake, Crowfoot Glacier, Bow Lake, the afore-mentioned Peyto Lake, Waterfowl Lake, Mount Amery, Mount Saskatchewan, the Big Bend (where we saw an elk* grazing by the side of the highway), the Sunwapta Pass and the Athabasca Glacier.

The Athabasca Glacier was a pretty major stop along the way. The glacier is part of the Columbia Icefield, which is kind of a master glacier that feeds other glaciers. It’s impressive partly for its size, and partly because it feeds three major rivers — the Athabasca, the North Saskatchewan and the Columbia, which end up in three different oceans: the Arctic (via the MacKenzie), the Atlantic (via Hudson’s Bay) and the Pacific respectively. For us, though, the Athabasca Glacier was the important part because we — and about a million other tourists — got to take a couple of buses up and walk around on the glacier. It’s pretty cool standing on a sheet of blue ice 1,000 feet thick that carved a canyon through a bunch of mountains. Granted, it was all packed down so tight that it felt more like wet snow than ice, but the view and the sense of grandeur that you got looking around at where you were and what it meant were impressive. Weird fact: the guy who drove us from the terminal up to the special ice-climbing bus was from Eastern Passage, NS. Another weird fact: Japanese tourists seem to be indigineous to the Rockies. You could add up all the ravens, chipmunks, pikas and various other animals we’ve seen since we arrived and they would total less than the number of Japanese tourists you would find in the ladies washroom at the Icefield Centre at any given time.

Anyway, after that two-hour excursion we continued north and saw some more impressive sights, like Sunwapta Falls, Mount Fryatt (which was, sadly, sans goats), Athabasca Falls, Horseshoe Lake, and finally Jasper itself. Of course, in between there was the the constant scenery which threatened to send us off the road, as it made concentrating on mere asphalt nearly impossible. We took a slightly scenic route into Jasper, which may have cost us, because we got caught at a train crossing; we waited about five minutes before doubling back and finding a new way in. After a minute or two we located our hotel, check in, marvelled at the size of our suite, and got to work unpacking and such. Nellie soaked her aching knees in the hot tub (no, I’m not kidding) while I located the wi-fi connection in the lobby and checked my IB mark. We then unloaded the pictures & videos from the camera onto the laptop; we easily broke yesterday’s record of 210 pictures by unloading over 400 pictures. Thank Yahweh for 2GB memory cards.

Anyway, that was it for day 3, up until the dinner I described earlier. We’re still trying to decide what to do tomorrow; it depends on timing and weather and Nellie’s knees. Speaking of the weather, I don’t want to jinx us, but I think we’ve been extraordinarily lucky. All three days have forecast cold weather and possible rain/snow, but have in fact been warmer than usual and perfectly sunny. It was 13 degrees when we reached Jasper today at dinner time, which I’d have to think is higher than average. Hell, it was 5 degrees on the glacier; the staff claimed it was usually -5 this time of year. We’ve definitely lucked out so far.

* It may have been a caribou. We saw it so suddenly, with no way to stop, that I was forced to just snap a blind picture through the rear window. Luckily I got it in the frame, but we haven’t had a chance yet to examine the picture further to determine exactly what we saw.

[tags]lake louise, jasper, icefields parkway, columbia icefield, athabasca glacier[/tags]