A sticky September snow coats the Icefields Parkway in Alberta's Jasper National Park. The majestic highway, designed to showcase the national parks through which it passes, stretches along the Continental Divide and skirts the massive Columbia Icefield, a reservoir of ice that covers 130 square miles (337 square kilometers) and is a 1000 feet (305 meters) deep.

(Text adapted from and photograph shot on assignment for, but not published in, the National Geographic book America's Great Hideaways, 1986)