We drove up the Icefield Parkway in Alberta during our trip to the Rockies. It was a lovely ride through some gorgeous scenery. The mountains around us included a lot of glaciers – the extent of which was apparently less than it used to be as they have retreated as the temperature has increased. I tried to strike a balance between stopping every five minutes to take photos and making sure we got all the way up the highway that we wanted to cover before we needed to turn for home.

The glaciers were quite distant but sufficiently large that this didn’t matter. What I found most interesting was the shapes that the ice would distort into as it came down the side of the mountains with some folding and crumpling of the ice sheets. Also, there was the dirt trapped in the ice from the rocks over which the glacier was passing. We also got to learn about the various types of glacier from some of the informational signs alongside the road. I am glad to have seen this many because who knows how long it will be before they have to rename this road??