Ian Rambles
It is all very impressive but somehow sterile. Promoted as wilderness but framed and glazed by the protection put in place by the parks authority until it is little more than a photo opportunity. The "Park Wardens" are decorative - and generally female and twentysomething - much like all the other theme parks.

Fiona's Journal
We started the day at Athabasca Falls, a stunning chain of waterfalls linking deep churning pools of frothing water that has carved itself deep into the rock. The whole thing has been made easily accessible with a large carpark and concrete walkways and bridges and steps. There were hoards of people traipsing round and that makes it very hard to think of this as dramatic wilderness. Selfishly I can't help wishing it had been left it as a steep hike off the highway and a scrarmble down into the gorge

When the rest of us get back to the RV we find that Ian has returned ahead of us and has dished up a great breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon and mushrooms and good strong coffee. Suddenly I am rather more in favour of easy accessibility!

We continued the tourist trail to the Athabasca Ice Fields where we walked on the glacier. The ice is retreating and no longer comes right up to the visitor centre carpark as it once did. You can see the terminal moraine and several smaller recessional moraines marking the retreat of the end of the glacier. We walked to the receding end of the glacier and then ducked under the rope (as did a great many people) in order to walk on the glacier. There were many notices giving dire warnings about rapidly fatal hypothermia if you fall into a crevasse so we proceeded with some caution. Arthur acted as my anchorman as I leaned out across the bore hole down which a small river within the ice plummeted, disappearing in a scarey vortex to who knows where. Harry, who often takes ice cubes from the freezer to crunch on, ate a piece of glacier.

We stopped briefly at Lake Louise, largely because we used to have a beautiful picture of this lake above our fireplace in Plymouth (whatever happened to that picture, I wonder?). It is still a stunningly beautiful lake with astonishingly turquoise water but it was just heaving with tourists like us so we didn't stay long. Sarah, Keith, Arthur and I went into the very grand and elegant hotel on the lake, in our scruffy shorts and sweatshirts, something I would never have done in Britain. Keith and Sarah assured me that Canadians really don't seem to give toss for such niceties which, charmingly, seems to be true.

However, by the end of the day I am feeling like a thoroughly “processed” tourist. The highway through Jasper National Park streams us all from one wallet-coshing opportunity to the next with maximum speed and efficiency, you see many of the same people again and again at each “sight”. The sights themselves are genuinely beautiful and dramatic but they have been tamed and overrun by people like us, so they are no longer wild.

We ended the day in another lovely forest campsite on Protection Mountain and, after a barbecue supper, Sarah and I secreted ourselves behind the curtains in the RV to wrap presents and write cards for Harry's birthday tomorrow.

Arthur's Log:
We walked on the tail end of a glacier today. Is felt like walking on a billion ice cubes and was apparently near 10 meters thick just on this little edge piece. The water from the melted ice had been running down it so long it had created 20 foot deep 1 foot wide chanels for the water which I could not imagine surrviving a fall into.

At one point the was a metre diameter hole with water wich dropped five metres then ended thirty metres away as an inch wide hole. There was a sign saying that the last three attempts to save someone after they fell failed and I can believe it.

The Harry Report
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George's Musings
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