At the 1922 Jasper Park Lodge, luxury and backwoods meet with dining, shopping and a heated pool, all located in a remote corner of the Canadian Rockies.
“Here you can leave a dinner reservation and then walk to your cabin room and see elk by your door,” said Blair Keating, regional tour sales manager for Fairmont Hotels and Resorts. “The Jasper Lodge wants to provide you with the park lodge experience, so it’s more spread out.”
His words were confirmed by several sightings of elk as I meandered the lodge’s snowy grounds.
In the morning, I once again had to combat my common sense by climbing into a raft on icy waters.
The Jasper Raft Tours normally run in the summer months, but to get a sample of the experience, our group boarded floating rafts from the snowy banks. The surreal float let me see the freezing turquoise water up close and the unbelievable mountain scenery in the distance.
“These trips are very calm,” said Scott Eady, general manager of Jasper Raft Tours. “We have a practice of not letting you in the water.”
After seeing the Rockies from a river, I beheld increasingly impressive views along the Icefields Parkway. The road follows a series of river valleys past mammoth mountains towering powerfully up into the sky.
“This is one of the most spectacular drives in the world,” said David Rose, tour manager for the Collette Vacations trip. “We’re going through the heart of the mountain range. This road was quite a feat of engineering because when it was built during the Great Depression, there would have been nothing here but a dirt trail.”
Soon I arrived at an icy landscape left over from the last ice age at the Columbia Icefield. A thick-wheeled Brewster Ice Explorers vehicle transported me across the dangerously steep, frozen slopes onto the ice field surrounded by glaciers and mountains.
As I stepped out of the vehicle, the surrounding white mountains and blue glaciers seemed like giants slumbering in the snow. The vista proved such a humbling experience that I felt like I was standing in an enormous cathedral of ice.
“Everything beneath us is the glacier covered by snow and debris,” said Bob, my Ice Explorers guide. “The glacier in front of us is the Athabasca Glacier. It is one of the largest glaciers in the 325-square-kilometer ice field.”
