The morning of Day 5 of our trip was spent on the last segment of our Ultimate Explorer Banff tour. We booked an 11 am tour for the Columbia Icefield Adventure & Skywalk visit, but arrived to the parking lot by 10:20 am. It’s about a 2 hour drive from Lake Louise.
If you have never seen a glacier before, this is worth doing. If you have, you could probably skip it though! The Skywalk is part of the tour as well, and you do this after visiting the glacier. The cool part of the tour is riding the big icefield trucks out to the glaciers—there are like 12 in the world and 9 of them are on this tour while the others are used around the world for scientific reasons. The entire tour lasts about 2.5 hours. The walk on the glacier itself is about 30 min. long (which is more than enough as the space for walking isn’t that big).
Columbia Icefield Glacier
For the Skywalk part, you can stay as long as you’d like and then take one of the many buses that circle around back. We finished the tour close to 1:30 pm and had lunch there at the Visitor Center since there is nothing else around but the food was decent (but pricey). The Skywalk was ok, I thought it would be more exciting since the floor is see-through glass but it’s also really thick and not as scary as you think since you can see your reflection and things like that, obscuring the true view.
View of the valley from Skywalk
As we were driving up to Jasper National Park, we stopped along a couple of other stops along the way but the weather was crappy (rainy) so we didn’t stay very long.
After leaving the Columbia Icefield Visitors Center at 2:30 pm we went to Sunwapta Falls, arriving at about 3:20 pm. It wasn’t that impressive as the others so this is skippable unless you want to kill some time!
Then we headed to Athabaska Falls, arriving at 3:45 pm but due to the rain, we didn’t stay long here either and left to check into the cutest log cabin in all the land, Alpine Village Jasper. We stayed in the Whistler One Bedroom Cabin, and it was expensive but SO worth it! Built in 2018, these cabins still felt so spanking new and was so cozy and comfortable to stay in. I loved it and would definitely stay here again! It had a full kitchen and it was nice to cook our own meals and have a cup of tea out on the patio. The entire area reminds me of being in a Disney fairy tale village. It’s about a ten minute drive into Jasper but it was so lovely to stay here out in nature with modern amenities. I’m also glad we stayed here because for the most part, it was raining most of our time in Jasper so to have a nice place to chill and relax indoors was quite nice. This place also has an outdoor hot tub (by reception) but we didn’t use it.
