Athabasca Glacier Tours — Ice Explorer & Columbia Icefield Skywalk

The Athabasca Glacier is the one most people mean when they say they want to “walk on a glacier” in the Canadian Rockies. It is the most accessible of the six principal outlet glaciers that flow down from the Columbia Icefield — the largest icefield in the Rocky Mountains — and it spills almost to the edge of the Icefields Parkway between Banff and Jasper National Parks, in Alberta. From the road it looks like you could simply walk up and step onto it. You can’t, and shouldn’t, do that on your own. That gap between how close it looks and how you actually get onto the ice safely is exactly what the tours on this page solve.

The Columbia Icefield, Briefly

The Columbia Icefield sits high on the Continental Divide, straddling the Banff–Jasper park boundary. It’s often called the hydrographic apex of North America: meltwater from here drains to three different oceans — north to the Arctic, east via Hudson Bay toward the Atlantic, and west to the Pacific. The Athabasca Glacier is the tongue of that icefield you can reach by road, and the ice the Ice Explorer drives across is thousands of years old.

It is also visibly shrinking. The Athabasca Glacier has retreated more than 1.5 kilometres and lost over half its volume in roughly the last 125 years, and the rate of loss has accelerated in recent decades — it currently recedes by several metres a year. That history is part of what makes a visit worthwhile now: a guide can show you marker posts dating the glacier’s former edges, so you literally walk the distance the ice has melted back within living memory.

Why You Need a Guide to Walk on the Ice

This is the single most important safety point. The glacier surface is laced with crevasses — deep cracks, sometimes hidden under a thin bridge of snow — and people have died falling into them while wandering onto the ice unsupervised. The only safe ways onto the Athabasca Glacier are inside the giant Ice Explorer snowcoach, which delivers you to a roped, crevasse-free area cleared for walking, or on a guided ice-walk led by a certified mountain guide. Hiking onto the glacier yourself, without training and equipment, is genuinely dangerous and strongly discouraged by Parks Canada.

The Ice Explorer and the Skywalk

The headline ticket combines two separate experiences that share one base, the Columbia Icefield Discovery Centre on the Parkway.

The Ice Explorer is a purpose-built, all-terrain bus on huge low-pressure tyres — only a couple of dozen exist in the world — that crawls down a steep moraine and out onto the glacier itself. You get time to step out, stand on the ice, and taste glacial meltwater, with a driver-guide explaining what you’re looking at.

The Columbia Icefield Skywalk is a few minutes away by shuttle: a glass-floored, horseshoe-shaped platform cantilevered out over the Sunwapta Valley, with the cliff and river dropping far below your feet. It’s an interpretive cliff-edge walkway rather than a glacier experience — the two are usually sold together as one ticket, which is the featured option on this page.

Getting There: Ticket vs. Day Trip

There are two ways to do it, and the right one depends on where you’re staying and whether you want to drive.

• The Ice Explorer & Skywalk ticket on its own is best if you’re already driving the Icefields Parkway or staying nearby. You arrive at the Discovery Centre under your own steam and just book the timed glacier-and-Skywalk experience.
• A full-day tour from Banff (or Jasper) wraps the same glacier experience inside round-trip transport, a guide, and a string of Parkway stops — typically Bow Lake, Peyto Lake, the Crowfoot Glacier, and sometimes Athabasca and Sunwapta Falls. The Parkway is one of the most scenic drives on earth, and these tours mean you can watch it instead of the road. They make a long day (often 10–12 hours), but you see far more than the glacier alone.

The tours and tickets listed here are run by independent, top-rated operators, not by Parks Canada. Day trips generally include the National Park Pass and round-trip transport; the standalone ticket covers glacier access and the Skywalk.

When to Go

The Columbia Icefield experience is seasonal. For 2026 the Discovery Centre, Ice Explorer, and Skywalk are scheduled to operate from about May 1 to October 12, weather permitting, with mid-summer the busiest stretch. June and September are quieter and still reliably open; the shoulder dates can be affected by early or late snow. Whenever you go, dress warmly — it is markedly colder out on the ice than in the valley, even in July — and bring sturdy footwear and sunglasses.

However you arrive, the payoff is the same: standing on a living glacier high in the Rockies, and looking out over an icefield that feeds half a continent. When you’re ready, check availability for the Ice Explorer and Skywalk.