We were surprised to find that many parks, campgrounds, and other features up in the Canadian Rockies don’t open until the second half of June. The weather that far north makes it silly to open any earlier. So as we drove along Scenic Highway 93A on this day, we just happened upon the first day opening of the road to Mount Edith Cavell. They had paved the road before they opened so we were one of the first vehicles to drive up the new road. It was very steep and winding but very smooth.

It looked interesting from the parking lot, but we found our hike to far exceed our expectations. Mount Edith Cavell has three glaciers on it: the Cavell, Angel, and Ghost Glaciers. We expected this to be a short hike but we ended up spending over two hours hiking. As you can see from the photos, the combination of rock, snow, water, glaciers, and avalanche debris including rocks and ice boulders made for an interesting landscape. The first photo will give you the best idea of where we spent the bulk of our two hours.

If you see the ice boulder to the right of the lake in the first photo, Vicky and I are standing in front of it in the second photo – to give you a size perspective. By this time, we were well aware that boulders such as this one had arrived at their current location by avalanche. We could also hear very frequent avalanche noises but despite hearing them with a high frequency, we never saw one at this location. I guess they were happening on the other side of the mountains and we could just hear them.

This place just seemed to have a magical look and feel. Vicky seemed ready to move on but Andrew, April and I had trouble prying ourselves away from it.