Tuesday 12th May

Today was our first day in the Rockies proper, having spent yesterday getting here. We checked out of our hotel in Valemount at 0730 and the first stop was Mount Robson - the highest mountain in the Canadian Rockies. And guess what ….. the weather was so crappy and the clouds so low we could hardly see any of it. The weather was very disappointing all day - we were at a high altitude for most of the day so therefore up in the clouds. I wasn’t too worried for myself as I was here about 10 years ago, but was disappointed for Terry as this is her first visit.
Our next stop was Maligne Canyon, an impressive 50 metres deep. A lot of it was still frozen. We had lunch in Jasper - set within the Jasper National Park. A $CAD5 burger and chips included a token for free entry into a ‘wildlife museum’ in the cellar of the pub. This ‘museum’ consisted of a stuffed version of every moving creature known in the area (apart from humans!) and was, in fact, very good and very interesting.
The afternoon took us to Athabasca Falls:

The Athabasca River originates at the Columbia Glacier about 70 kilometers south. Among the most powerful and breathtaking falls in the Rocky Mountains, the Athabasca River thunders through a narrow gorge where the walls have been smoothed and potholes are created by the sheer force of the rushing water carrying sand and rock.
We then drove along the world famous Icefield Parkway to the Columbia Icefields. Again the weather was awful, the clouds were low (or we were high!) and it was snowing so heavily that we again could not see any mountains. We transferred to a special snowcoach which had bloomin’ great wheels and trundled slowly up to the glacier wondering what the heck we had let ourselves in for. Our allotted time on the glacier was 20 minutes, but it was so cold and snowing so heavily that we spent less than 5 minutes outside the heated coach, taking the obligatory photographs, and the other 15 waiting inside the coach to return to base. Again, I had done this before so I knew how special it would have been if we could have seen the wonderful scenery there and not felt so cold!
We had a fantastic sighting of a bear on the way to our hotel - I got a really great zoomed-in pic, then deleted the ruddy thing my mistake! Lesson learned - delete photos with care!
We were booked into the Lake Louise Inn for 2 nights, and got there around 7pm. We had a quick pizza for dinner and early night as we were both pretty tired.