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Few places in Canada announce themselves as dramatically as Jasper. Sitting at the confluence of the Athabasca and Miette rivers in the Canadian Rockies, it occupies the northern reaches of Jasper National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that stretches across more than ten thousand square kilometres of Alberta wilderness. The town itself is small enough to walk across in twenty minutes, yet it functions as a gateway to landscapes that take days, even weeks, to begin to understand properly.

The park's character is shaped by ice as much as by rock. The Columbia Icefield, straddling the boundary between Jasper and Banff national parks along the Icefields Parkway, is one of the largest accumulations of ice south of the Arctic Circle in North America. The Athabasca Glacier, which flows from it, is among the most accessible glaciers on the continent, and the experience of stepping onto its surface, guided across crevasse fields by purpose-built Ice Explorer vehicles, gives a physical sense of geological time that no photograph quite replicates. The Columbia Icefield Discovery Centre serves as the departure point for the Ice Explorer Glacier Tour, which also includes entry to the Skywalk, a glass-floored observation platform cantilevered over the Sunwapta Valley at a height of roughly 280 metres. Both experiences together represent the clearest single illustration of what makes this corner of Alberta unlike anywhere else in the country.