We rode the Ice Fields Parkway from Banff to Jasper Yesterday. It's listed as 180 miles long, but took us nearly 5 hours to drive. Not because of traffic or windy mountain roads, but because of all of the breathtaking scenery along the way! The highway gets its name from the Columbia Ice Fields which straddle the border between Alberta and British Columbia, also forms part of the continental divide. It is an ice field, not a glacier, but ice and snow that fills the valley between mountains. These fields feed into eight major glaciers that cascade down from the mountains along the road. The river that flows from the glaciers is milky-white from all of the glacier flour suspended in it, but when it forms a lake the water settles and becomes a jade green.
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