Columbia Icefield Skywalk Tickets and Tours

The one thing to understand before you book

Search “Columbia Icefield Skywalk tour” and you get two completely different products sold in nearly identical language, and the difference costs money.

The first is a Pursuit attraction ticket. Pursuit runs the Skywalk and the Athabasca Glacier Ice Explorer from the Columbia Icefield Discovery Centre on Highway 93. Buy that and you are buying entry to the glass platform, the shuttle that reaches it, and — on the combined ticket — the coach that drives onto the glacier. What you are not buying is any way of getting to the Discovery Centre in the first place.

The second is a day tour up the Icefields Parkway from Banff, Canmore, Calgary or Jasper. That buys you the driving, a guide, the national park pass and the roadside stops at Peyto Lake, Bow Lake and Crowfoot Glacier. Read the exclusions on almost any of them and you will find the same two lines: entry ticket to Columbia Icefield Adventure and entry ticket to Columbia Icefield Skywalk. One operator puts it in the highlights rather than burying it — “note that Columbia Icefield and Skywalk tickets are not included in the price” — which is unusually honest and tells you how often people are caught out.

Neither product is a rip-off. They simply solve different halves of the same day, and a lot of visitors buy one assuming it contains the other. If you are driving the Parkway yourself, you want the attraction ticket. If you are not driving, you want both — and you should book the attraction ticket to match the arrival slot your tour operator gives you, rather than hoping for availability at the counter in August.

What the Skywalk actually is

A glass-floored observation platform that curves out from the cliff face of the Sunwapta Valley, 918 feet (280 metres) above the valley floor. You reach it along roughly a kilometre of interpretive boardwalk, with panels on the geology, the fossil record and the wildlife that moves through the valley below, and a multilingual audio guide included in the ticket.

There is no public parking at the Skywalk. Everyone rides the shuttle from the Discovery Centre, which is why it comes bundled rather than sold as an add-on. Most people are done inside an hour.

That hour is worth being honest about, because it is what the ratings reflect. The Skywalk on its own rates 4.3 from more than a thousand guests — a genuinely striking viewpoint and a well-built walk, but a viewpoint and a walk. The combined ticket that adds the Ice Explorer rates 4.6 from over 3,100 guests. Standing on the ice is what lifts the day, and the reviews say so consistently.

The glacier half

The Athabasca Glacier is the largest of six outlet glaciers flowing off the Columbia Icefield, the biggest icefield in the Rocky Mountains. The Ice Explorer is an all-terrain coach with tires tall enough to climb the lateral moraine and drive directly onto the ice, where you get about twenty minutes in a roped area. Meltwater runs across the surface and you are welcome to fill a bottle — bring an empty one, because nothing is sold out there.

It is also a glacier visibly in retreat, and the guides do not soften it. The Athabasca has receded well over a kilometre in the last century and continues to pull back several metres a year, thinning as it goes. The moraine you drive across on the way up is ground the ice occupied within living memory.

Season is the constraint that decides everything

Both attractions are seasonal. Pursuit’s published dates for 2026 are May 1 to October 12, weather dependent, with the Skywalk and the Ice Explorer opening and closing together. One tour operator states the closure as 13 October to 3 May, which is the same window from the other side.

This matters more than it sounds, because tour listings do not always make it obvious. A day tour titled “Columbia Icefield and Skywalk” will still run in February — it simply substitutes Lake Louise, Marble Canyon or the frozen methane bubbles of Abraham Lake for the attractions that are shut. Those are good winter days out. They are not the glass floor.

Within the season, the shoulders are the sweet spot: early May and late September have thinner crowds, and an afternoon slot is generally quieter than mid-morning, when the coach traffic from Banff arrives. The Icefield sits above 2,000 metres and generates its own weather, so it runs cold and windy even in July. Layers, gloves, a waterproof shell and grippy shoes are not over-preparation.

Getting there

The Discovery Centre is roughly 100 km south of Jasper townsite, 130 km north of Lake Louise, and about 180 km — two and a half to three hours of driving — from Banff. There is no fuel between Saskatchewan River Crossing and the Icefield, which is the practical reason most visitors either leave very early or hand the driving to someone else. If that is you, the most-reviewed Parkway day tour picks up in Calgary, Canmore and Banff and includes the national park pass.

The 2024 Jasper wildfire closed the Parkway and the Icefield for part of that summer; both reopened in August 2024 and have operated normally since.

Choosing between them

If you want a walk through the actual decision — Skywalk alone, combined ticket, or a full-day tour from a particular town — our guide to which Columbia Icefield tour is right for you compares them side by side on price, duration, what is included and who each one suits. The Adventure versus Skywalk comparison goes deeper on the two attraction tickets specifically.