Repair work on Cavell Road and the parking lot has been ongoing since late last month and it is anticipated the road will be open to all traffic on schedule, June 15.
For those who have visited the area before, the view will be noticeably different, as 70 per cent of Ghost Glacier is missing from the north face of Mount Edith Cavell and new channels have been carved by the water and debris that washed over the area.
“One of the interesting things that happened,” said Kirsten Schmitten, an interpretive guide who has been compiling a research paper on Mount Edith Cavell since Ghost Glacier fell, “is [the outbreak flood] uncovered a sub fossil forest that we never knew had existed, and now there are studies taking place [there].”
And that’s not the only surprise that was uncovered by the outbreak from Cavell Tarn—“all of a sudden we’re seeing caves that we’ve never seen before,” said Schmitten. “[The flood] uncovered a bunch of things that are going to be really fascinating for interpretation this year and the years to come.”
Mount Edith Cavell attracts between 150,000 to 200,000 visitors between June and October, with peak use happening in August.
Most people who use the area are visitors who aren’t comfortable being immersed in wilderness or alpine environments, said Pam Clark, visitor experience manager for Jasper National Park. “We would classify them as view from the edge or step into the wilderness kind of visitors.”
To keep visitors safe, Parks Canada closed the Mount Edith Cavell area last summer in order to complete an $85,000 geotechnical assessment, highlighting the areas that pose the greatest hazard.
Clark said mitigation measures will be concentrated around Cavell Tarn, the Lower Path of the Glacier trail and the picnic area.
“Right now the plan is in the short-term we want to remove access from people getting too close to the tarn.” Work is also being done to re-loop the trail, as 100 to 200 metres of the lower path was washed out.
“We’re going to create some viewing areas...where people can gather and mill about and we can put some signs in and put some rocks up to keep people from venturing further.
“We’re also going to have an interpreter on site this summer because we think there’s going to be lots of questions.”
Mount Edith Cavell is an iconic mountain, with a long and storied history, beyond the fall of Ghost Glacier last year.
It was named in 1916 after Edith Cavell, a nurse in occupied Belgium who was captured in 1915 and later killed for helping allied soldiers escape the country.
Because of Canada’s ties with Britain during the First World War, the Prime Minister decided to commemorate Cavell and asked A.O. Wheeler to find a mountain fitting of her name and heroism.
Wheeler settled on the mountain that we all know today—a mountain in the central range of the Canadian Rockies that towers over the peaks that surround it.
