Athabasca Glacier

The Athabasca Glacier is one of the most accessible glaciers in North America, pouring off the Columbia Icefield — one of the largest icefields in the Rocky Mountains — right down to a parking lot on the Icefields Parkway. You can walk to the toe of the glacier in about 20 minutes from the road, though the approach path is steep in places and the ice itself is off-limits without a guide due to hidden crevasses.

Snocoach tours drive directly onto the glacier surface and are popular, but simply standing at the toe and looking up at the blue-tinged ice is free and often more affecting. What you see is a glacier in accelerating retreat: the moraines on either side are littered with rock and debris exposed as the ice has thinned. Scientists project that the Athabasca Glacier could largely disappear by 2100. It is a sight with a countdown attached.

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Wooden stakes along the approach to the glacier mark where the ice reached in 1992, 2000, and 2008. Each stake stands dozens of metres from the one before it, separated not by distance you can ignore but by decades of retreat you cannot. The Columbia Icefield covers 325 square kilometres, but the Athabasca Glacier alone has lost more than 1.5 kilometres of length since measurements began — roughly half its 20th-century extent.

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