Snow on Wheels: the Athabasca Glacier by Andrew Bain

Canada’s Icefields Parkway is promoted as ‘the most beautiful road in the world’ but it has one imperfection: from the road, as you wind through the Rocky Mountains between Lake Louise and Jasper, you can see almost none of the 13 eponymous icefields that line it.

The Columbia Icefield is the exception. The largest icefield in the Rocky Mountains, it sits atop the roadside peaks like a rim of icing. Through one low gap in the range it meanders down into the valley, almost to the road, as the Athabasca Glacier.

Travellers on the Icefields Parkway can take a short walk up to, and even onto, the snout of the glacier. But what’s truly unique here is that they can also ride a bus - a so-called Snocoach or Ice Explorer - high onto the ice itself, an experience that has made this glacier the most visited in North America.

“You are about to drive onto the largest mass of ice south of the Arctic Circle,” our Snocoach driver Dave assures us, a curious claim that seems to overlook a little place called Antarctica.

Dipping through a dam of water to wash away any mud and dirt from the Snocoach’s metre-wide, monster-truck tyres, the vehicle crunches onto the Athabasca Glacier. Following a graded highway of ice towards its centre, we motor along in disregard for the natural laws of the mountains, which decree it dangerous to walk on a glacier, let alone drive.

What tames the glacier are the graders that daily smooth the road, pasting over any potential crevasses. This morning, we follow the grader high onto the glacier, climbing towards the first of three icefalls, where the glacier crumbles as it bends and squeezes between the mountain walls. The roadside scenery is unique, looking out onto the icy blue expanse of the glacier and the dark rock walls of the adjacent peaks.

At a makeshift car park we stop, climbing out of the Snocoach and onto the glacier, where we can wander around on the slick and smooth ice for the next 30 minutes, though the bitter cold, even on this midsummer day, chases some people back into the bus within minutes. Blue cones mark a safe zone; outside these bits of plastic the Athabasca Glacier is a land of yawning crevasses.

The scene from outside the Snocoach is a snapshot of the high alpine world, incorporating peaks, the icefield, glaciers that hang like tongues from the surrounding mountains, and waterfalls that weep down the mountainsides. On a good day you can stand in this most unlikely of car parks and watch the surrounding glaciers avalanche down the black mountains with a thunderous roar.

There’s a barren beauty to the scene that calls to mind a phrase by mountain photographer Galen Rowell: ‘the throne room of the mountain gods’. Far below in the valley, the Columbia Icefields Visitor Centre, which is part-souvenir shop, part-restaurant, part-hotel and part-bus depot, has shrunk to the size of a dollhouse.

As I step noisily across the ice, the glacier appears enormous, though it represents just two percent of the Columbia Icefield, a 325-square-kilometre chunk of ice that is one of the Rockies’ most impressive natural features, its meltwater draining away to three oceans: Pacific, Atlantic and Arctic. Rising around the icefield are 11 of the Canadian Rockies’ 22 highest peaks.

I stand and watch snow drifts blow across the icefield, which sits like a shelf at the head of the glacier, and feel my fingers turning as glacial as the 300-metre-deep ice on which I stand. It’s time to return to the Snocoach.