Athabasca River Confluence

The Athabasca River originates at the Columbia Icefield in Jasper National Park and flows more than 700 miles before emptying into Lake Athabasca. It splinters into many ribbons which thread across the gravel glacial valley. Its water is an ethereal pearly blue-grey color caused by rock flour, which is fine-grained, suspended glacial sediment.

In 2016, my daughter Mary and I set off across Alaska and Canada on a Great White North Adventure, which you can read about starting here. We arrived in Anchorage at the beginning of September and got home in mid-October. In retrospect, it might have made more sense to do this during the summer, since Alaska and Canada threw a mess of strange weather at us.