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| The Columbia Icefield covers roughly 125 square miles. |
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| Our specially designed arctic bus rests comfortably on a thousand feet of ice. |
On one of the world's most scenic drives, midway between Banff and Jasper, lie a half dozen glaciers within the Columbia Icefield. These are relics of the great ice age, and a lesser ice age from1844. All the lower glaciers are receding. Nonetheless, the Columbia Icefield is still as big as the city of Vancouver. Because it's dangerous for a novice hiker to walk on a glacier, we were smart and took a tour, riding on a bus designed for use in the Arctic. Each bus has six massive wheels that are designed to navigate ice as well as steep moraines, which is the fancy word for the pile of rocks left over when a glacier recedes.
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| Tasting pure glacial water |
We got a chance to step out on the ice, which can be a thousand feet thick. It was a bit slushy. Water poured from the edges of the clearing and we all took a drink. I was the freshest, purest water imaginable, but also bitterly cold.
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