Our last day in Jasper dawned much nicer than the day before so after breakfast in a local coffee shop we headed to Mt Edith Clavell.
We actually took a wrong turn but that was kind of serendipitous because we got to meet this guy on the wrong road.
He was just lying quietly by the side of the road but keeping an eye on three female elk gerazing nearby. A friendly park ranger had to warn some of the gathered spectators that there are two places you don't want to be during the rut - between a bull and a female and between two bulls. Eventually this big boy ambled off into the woods.
Mt. Edith Clavell (everyone always uses the full name, never "Mt. Edith" or "Mt. Clavell") is an impressive 3300 meter (10,590 feet) peak. The mountain is named for a British nurse who was executed in World War I for helping Allied prisoners escape from occupied Brussels.
Mt. Edith Clavell Road is " a twisting turning 14 kilometer (8.7 miles) route." (Whoever wrote that has never been on a twisting turning mountain road in Puerto Rico!) It is relatively narrow with a steep drop on the passenger side (going up).
And then Elaine saw the "Imminent death" sign. She was sure this sign meant your car was immediately going to flip over, plunging you to your death in the stream below.
We didn't have as much time as we would have liked at Mt. Edith Clavell; our day still included our last drive down the Icefield Parkway and beyond to Banff. So we chose to walk the shorter Path of the Glacier Trail.
During the Great Glaciation, when ice covered most of this part of the world, this whole valley was full of ice up to that dark edge slanting in from the top left of the photo below. In fact that huge glacier carved this valley out of the mountains. It is impossible to get any true sense of the size of valley from the photos. "Huge" and "enormous" are just the beginning. And to try to imagine just how much ice was here and then to focus on the power of that ice, its ability to cave through granite on this scale - it is staggering.
Today the massive glacier is long gone but there are still two glaciers on the flanks of Mt. Edith Clavell.
Ghost Glacier is at the center left in the above photo and Angel Glacier is on the right.
I'll return to this theme in a few days when I write more about glaciers but we, or at least I, tend to think about glaciers in a kind of past tense abstract way. I lived in Michigan and yes, I know the great glaciers carved out the great lakes. I know when you fly south out of Michigan you can see in the landscape pretty much exactly where the great ice sheet ended. I know glaciers created much of what we've been looking at for the last two weeks. I know climatologists are tracking the world's remaining glaciers to measure global warming. But they are distant and abstract. Until you see one.
A waterfall - just a trickle at this time of year - drains the annual melt from Angel Glacier in to a small lake below. Photos taken before 2012, including the"official" photo on the Parks Canada page, show a much larger lake at the foot of the mountain.
On August 9 several "small" bits of Ghost Glacier slid down Angel Glacier and into the lake. There are videos of this on the Internet. Then about 5:30 am August 10, a massive amount of ice, estimated somewhere between 9,000 and 24,000 square meters, crashed from the face of the mountain into the lake below. The lake became a roaring tsunami pouring water, ice and rock down the valley, reshaping the valley and destroying parking and other facilities. The road was so badly damaged in places that it was closed for the rest of 3012. Officials estimate Ghost Glacier lost half or more of its mass in that one fall.
My real point is this: these glaciers are not abstract. They are active, constantly changing participants in our world. And that is just mind-blowing
No comments:
Post a Comment