Icefield Parkway, Glacier Skywalk (Jasper) / Peyto Lake, Bow Falls, Hoodoos (Banff)

Sept 1, 2026 – Day 9 (A long day!)

Today we hit the road again — the Columbia Icefield Parkway, or Promenade des Glaciers if you’re feeling fancy. This dramatic highway traces the Continental Divide straight through the heart of Jasper and Banff, stringing together showstoppers like Bow Lake, Peyto Lake, and Sunwapta and Athabasca Falls along the way. It also skirts the massive Columbia Icefield — ice that’s been sitting there since 126,000 to 238,000 years ago — whose Snow Dome pulls off a neat trick: it’s one of only two spots on Earth where meltwater splits three ways, feeding three different oceans.

At midday came the main event: tiptoeing across the Glacier Skywalk, nerves and all. This cliff-edge walkway juts out to a glass-bottomed observation deck hanging nearly 1,000 feet above the valley floor — not for the faint of heart, but easily one of the wildest ways to take in the Canadian Rockies. Exhibits along the way covered waterfalls, fossils, and local wildlife, but let’s be honest, the deck stole the show. Standing where eagles soar below you, with glaciers, jagged peaks, and thundering waterfalls stretching out in every direction, is a view that’s hard to beat.

Peyto Lake looked so absurdly turquoise it seems photoshopped — but the real explanation is even cooler. Credit the Peyto Glacier, which grinds rock into a powder so fine (called rock flour) that it just floats in the meltwater instead of sinking. Add sunlight, and physics takes over: the lake absorbs the reds, oranges, and yellows, bounces back the greens and blues, and the suspended rock flour nudges things further toward green. More flour, more green — nature’s own paint mixer.

The hoodoos were nature’s weirdest rock sculptures. These tapering stone pillars are the survivors of thousands of years of rain, snowmelt, and wind chewing away at glacial rock — each one saved by a lucky cap of sod or harder stone that acted like a tiny umbrella while everything around it eroded into oblivion. Standing among them, it’s easy to see why they’ve spooked and fascinated people for centuries — even the origin of the name “hoodoo” is a mystery. They pop up elsewhere in the Rockies too, like Yoho National Park’s Leanchoil hoodoos, but for the ultimate hoodoo pilgrimage, Alberta’s Badlands are the place to go.

We also swung by Bow Falls — short on height, big on drama. It might not crack any “tallest waterfall” lists, but it’s got serious Hollywood cred: this is where Marilyn Monroe went tumbling down the rapids in River of No Return back in 1954 (stunt double doing the actual tumbling, let’s be honest).

We wrapped up the day at the Rimrock, clinging to the side of Sulphur Mountain like it’s daring you to look down at the Bow Valley. This Four Diamond hideaway practically shares a driveway with the Banff Upper Hot Springs, tucked into pine forest with alpine charm to spare — the perfect landing spot for dinner after a day of glass floors, weird rocks, and impossibly blue lakes.

Columbia Icefield Parkway/Athabasca Glacier/ Jasper

Aug 30, 2026 – Day 7

We departed the Columbia Icefield Parkway for the drive to the Columbia Icefield in Banff National Park, a UNESCO site. At an elevation of nearly 10,000 feet, this 125-square-mile tract of snow and ice — up to 1,200 feet deep in places — is the largest ice field in the Rocky Mountains, formed during the Great Glaciation roughly 126,000 to 238,000 years ago. It’s remote enough that Europeans didn’t record it until the 1800s. Interestingly, the Columbia Icefield marks a triple Continental Divide point — meaning waters originating here ultimately flow into the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic Oceans. Six major glaciers spill off the icefield, including Athabasca, Columbia, Dome, and Stutfield.

Here came a tour highlight: we bundled up and boarded the Ice Explorer — a monster all-terrain vehicle with tires built specifically to crawl right onto glacier ice — for the ride out to Athabasca Glacier, the most-visited glacier in North America. The glacier itself is 10,000–12,000 years old, though the ice we were actually walking on at the toe was a comparatively young 150–200 years — it takes about two centuries for a snowflake landing on the icefield above to compress into ice, travel the six-kilometer length of the glacier, and finally melt out at the bottom. Once there, we hopped out to explore — keeping an eye out for exposed blue ice, meltwater streams, and crevasses — snap photos, and warm ourselves from the inside out with a shot of Canadian Maple Rye. Along the glacier’s edge we could see the terminal and lateral moraines the ice has left behind as it’s retreated roughly a mile since the mid-1800s.

We then descended to the base station for lunch before beginning our drive northward again, visiting breathtaking Athabasca Falls along the way, and arrived at our centrally located hotel in the town of Jasper, within Jasper National Park (also a UNESCO site) — Whistlers Inn.

After dinner, we joined a free Jasper walking tour and learned the town’s history, including two Hollywood tales: Marilyn Monroe spent three weeks in Jasper in 1953 filming River of No Return, and famously slipped into the icy Maligne River, spraining her ankle before Robert Mitchum and crew rushed to save her. Bing Crosby, meanwhile, fell so hard for the Jasper Park Lodge golf course while filming The Emperor Waltz in 1948 that he came back the next year just to play in a tournament — and won. One photo on display was a reminder of very different wildlife etiquette back then: Bing casually feeding a bear, something you’d never see (or do) in the park today.