Lake O’Hara – the trail to Mordor

Panorama of the Lake O’Hara area, taken at Wilwaxy Pass

The trail to Mordor – looking at the Lake Oesa basin from near Wilwaxy Pass.  Route barely visible.

Kristen on the way out of the Lake Oesa basin

Jeff nearing the Opabin Plateau area

Panorama of the Lake O’Hara area, taken at All Souls

Lake O’Hara is, simply put, the best hiking I have ever done.  It is also easily in Kristen’s all-time top 5 (she has a lot more experience than me).

The lake itself is situated in a glacial basin about 10-15 miles Northwest of Lake Louise, just across the British Columbia border into Yoho National Park.  Access to the lake basin is severely restricted, in order to keep the area as pristine as possible.  A bus runs a few times a day from the parking area near the highway, up the 11km dirt road, to a small and rustic day hut at the base of the lake (named Le Relais, but called Le Creuset by Kristen because she couldn’t remember the proper name).  Bus reservations are taken exactly three months in advance, and fill up within minutes.  You are not allowed to drive your car up the road, and not allowed to ride a mountain bike up the road.  You either take the bus, or you walk (which almost nobody does).

We had not heard about Lake O’Hara when we planned this part of the trip.  Kristen read a few snippets about it the day we arrived in Banff, buried somewhere in our Canadian Rockies guidebook.  The book said it was the best hiking in all of the Canadian Rockies, but good luck getting there.  So of course, we had to do it.  But we didn’t have bus reservations.  Information on the internet was spotty, but we read that it might be possible to get next-day reservations by going to the visitor center in nearby Field, BC at 7:30am the day before you wanted to hike.  So we woke up at 6 on our rainy day in Banff and did the 1 hour drive to Field.  No dice, doesn’t work that way, no spots.  They told us if we showed up at the Lake O’Hara parking lot at 7:30am the day we wanted to hike, we would have a good shot at a standby/cancellation spot on the 8:30am bus.  It was seeming pretty iffy at this point, but we said screw it and woke up at 6am again.  We got to the parking lot at 7:30am as instructed, and we were the sixth group in the standby line!  People had arrived at 6am to secure their spots.  Crap.  We didn’t get a spot on the bus.

It was walk up or go home.  We walked up.

The roughly 6.5 miles and 1000 vertical feet took only a little over 2 hours to cover, and we were feeling pretty good when we arrived at the day hut.  Even better, the area looked spectacular.  We asked for advice on hikes in the area, and the girl working the counter at the day hut told us we had to take the ‘Alpine Circuit’ route.

Apparently the Alpine Club of Canada built a ridiculous trail around the walls of the basin.  Lake O’Hara is walled in maybe 200-250 degrees around by sheer peaks, with various terraced lakes, benches, passes, and hanging valleys above it.  The ‘Alpine Circuit’ begins at one end of the wall, goes straight up (steepest trail I’ve ever been on), stays up, traveling across scree fields on the sheer mountainsides, visits two lake basins on its way around, then finally drops down back to the valley floor most of the way to the other end.  It’s only 12km in total distance, but is tough going.  There is barely a trail in many sections.  However, the views are totally worth it.  The trail is above treeline for 95% of the hike, so your entire field of view is filled with peaks and glaciers all day.

We were so excited to begin, we absolutely bombed up the initial hillside (~1500ft elevation gain over 1 mile, yikes) to get to Wilwaxy Pass, the first major lookout point of the hike.  From there, we traveled to Lake Oesa.  This was our favorite part of the hike.  It felt like walking the trail to Mordor.  A narrow trail on a mountainside, loose rocks, 500ft drops, and giant, imposing layer-cake mountains in all colors, in all directions.  It was the most fantastic place I’ve ever been.  We ate lunch at Lake Oesa, which is the top in a series of terraced lakes and waterfalls that drop down to Lake O’Hara.  From there it was more rock scrambling and non-stop views on the way to the Opabin Plateau (called the O’Pabst Blue Ribbon Plateau by me all day because I couldn’t remember the proper name), a lush bench with many small lakes and a series of trails criss-crossing them.  We spent a bit of time on the plateau, and then made our way up the absolutely terrifying ascent to All Souls lookout point (the high point on the far side of the trail) for the best panorama of the area.  And from there it was finally down back to the day hut.  I was absolutely destroyed by the end of the hike, but Kristen was somehow feeling good.  We caught the bus back down the access road (no reservations required) and returned back to our campsite Banff, exhausted.

We’re pretty glad Lake O’Hara is a ‘best kept secret.’  Almost everyone we met up there had been before, and were fairly serious hiking enthusiasts.  It’s less than an hour away from Banff, yet totally unspoiled.  We will be back – our first discussion after coming out of the area was regarding who we should tell first about the area, and which friends we should bring up there next summer.

Banff/Lake Louise

Typical oddly eroded limestone peaks in the Banff area

Kristen looking down onto Lake Louise from Big Beehive

Borgeau Lake

The spectacular Moraine Lake

Banff is about a 4-5 hour drive from Glacier NP, but it looks completely different.  The most striking mountains are capped with limestone, which is a brilliant bright white, and erodes in very odd ways.  Some mountains look like they’re made of Legos, with layer upon layer of odd shapes protruding everywhere.

We had our own names for some of the peaks - “trapdoor mountain” for the peak above the town of Banff (it really did form like a trapdoor, a slab of rock tilting up toward the sky), “mount melty” for a series of peaks that had insanely eroded faces, “terrace mountain” for one peak that had chunks broken off its top, forming flat spaces that grass was growing on, and so on.  Why did we make up our own names for the mountains?  Because the attractions in the area are named terribly.  Many, if not most of the lakes and peaks we came across had some boring person’s name.  Lake Louise.  Lake O’Hara.  Nigel Creek.  These are not names that inspire the imagination, despite the fact that they are SPECTACULAR places.  Especially after we had come from Glacier NP, where they have totally awesome names like “Two Medicine” or “Siyeh Pass”.

And that wasn’t the only point of differentiation from Glacier NP.  I’ll save our thoughts on Canada’s national park system for another post, but suffice it to say Banff NP was extremely ‘touristy’.  Where Glacier was rugged and raw, Banff is a posh ski town with stores that sell Gucci.  We couldn’t help but create a system to decide how in tune with the wilderness around it a place is (specifically in Grizzly country).  Where Glacier was accessible bear spray, backpackers, ponchos, layers, bear safety enforcement, and rugged trails, Banff was tucked in collared cotton shirts, unprepared hikers carrying no water, no warm layers (and up on mountain passes it often gets really cold really quickly), bear bells, and people hiking silently.  Moving from Glacier to Banff was a pretty serious change of pace.

That said, we really liked the town of Banff.  It has great coffee shops, grocery stores, and a few (if you can find them) cheap options for dinner.  It has a bit of the same feel as Aspen.  And the surrounding mountains are spectacular.

We think we got a pretty good feel for the place in our few days there:

Day 1: hikes in the Lake Louise area.  Lake Louise is an absolutely gorgeous, milky blue lake (the milky color is the result of ‘glacial till,’ or pulverized rock, draining into the lake).  It was the first lake of this color I’d ever seen, and it reminded Kristen of the glacial rivers she’d seen in Patagonia.  We hiked up to the Lake Agnes Teahouse to eat lunch (the area above Lake Louise contains two alpine tea houses).  The teahouse itself was a disappointment – spaced out staff and high prices, but the scenery was great.  We then hiked over Big Beehive and on to the Plain of the Six Glaciers trail, stopping for tea at the more inaccessible and rustic Plain of the Six Glaciers Teahouse.  This second teahouse was great – the staff packs in all their ingredients, they have no electricity, and you really feel like you’re in a remote part of the woods.  We hiked out in the late afternoon for a total trip of about 10-12 miles.

Day 2: hiked to Borgeau Lake.  We were a bit tired from the previous day, so the moderate hike surprisingly took it out of us.  The lake itself was nice, and we had fun chasing Pikas around on the scree-filled shore.

Day 3: rainy and cold.  We drove briefly up to the spectacular (even more so than Lake Louise) Moraine Lake to look around, but it was so cold we left within 10 minutes.  So we took the rest of the day off, hanging around the town of Banff.

Day 4: hiked at Lake O’Hara.  So spectacular it merits its own post.

Glacier National Park

Us at Avalanche Lake

Siyeh Pass – the view looking East

Jeff on the shore of Bowman Lake

The view over the back side of Dawson Pass

I have never seen anything like Glacier National Park.  We’d both been looking forward to this part of the trip, because we knew it would be scenic.  But we had no idea how overwhelming it would be.

Glacier NP is isolated.  There are a couple of very small towns flanking it, and almost no infrastructure inside the park.  There is only one road that traverses the park – the Going to the Sun road.  It rises from the valley floor up to Logan Pas with no switchbacks – just a steady ascent up the mountainside on an extremely narrow road.  The rest of the access to the park is via minor roads that go from the park boundary in about 5-10 miles to various trailheads.  All this is to say, Glacier NP is not a park for driving.  It’s not a park for really much of anything except hiking.  The best stuff in the park is only accessible by foot, and usually a few thousand feet up.

We happened to have fantastic insider guidance.  Our friend Joanne has some good friends who live right near the park, and they wrote us a super-long email with tips on hikes, where to stay, etc.  We followed it:

Day 1: had some campground issues, then drove the Going-to-the-Sun road from our campsite on the West side of the park over the pass to the East side.  Easily the scariest, and certainly one of the prettiest roads I’ve ever driven.  We also did an easy 4 mile hike to Avalanche Lake, which was fantastically gorgeous.  3+ waterfalls with glacial sources fell thousands of feet to feed the lake.  The glacial bowl took up my entire field of view.

Side note #1: on the hike up to the lake, a couple of locals made snarky comments about the bear bells we were wearing - “did you buy those at the Bear Bait Bell Co?”, and “do I hear Santa Claus coming?”.  We were a bit confused at this point.  We noticed that that the locals don’t wear bear bells and were wondering why.  But we figured they couldn’t hurt and left them on our packs.

Day 2: hiked up and over Siyeh Pass (a local’s favorite).  We hiked it East-to-West, which is sort of backwards from the usual route.  The hike gains over 3,000ft the way we hiked it, but only 2,000ft if you hike the other direction (which is why that direction is the most popular).  Views were indescribable nearly all the way up – above treeline for 75% of the hike, with views of no less than 3 classic U-shaped glacial valleys at the top.

Day 3: rainy and cold.  On the advice of Joanne’s friends, we drove up to Bowman Lake in the NW corner of the park to do some walking along the shore in between rain showers, and a little fishing.  And wow, Bowman lake is like a vision of what a mountain lake should be.  Framed by a glacial valley, deep blue water, etc.  And because this is a very isolated part of the park, there was barely anyone around.  There is, however, a tiny two-store town called Polebridge at the park’s edge.  We stopped in at the Polebridge Mercantile for huckleberry bear claws on the way in, and at the local restaurant-bar-meetup joint for pizza on the way out.  We were probably the only non-locals around.

Day 4: hiked up to Dawson Pass in the Two Medicine area.  There is a boat that crosses Two Medicine lake, cutting about 2 miles off of either end of the hike.  We planned to hike in and take the boat back (for an ~11 mile hike).  Views from the top were great, featuring a swooping U-shaped valley and views of the Divide.  But, the majority of the hike was in the forest, with known grizzly populations in the area.  We went quite slow through the more densely forested sections, making lots of noise as we walked (especially on the way down).  Because of this, we mis-calculated our timing and missed the last boat back.  So we had to walk through MORE grizzly-infested woods at near dusk (also known to us as “bear o’clock”).  Great hike, but pretty stressful for Kristen especially due to her intense fear of bears, made worse by our run-in with a couple who had just seen a huge grizzly just off the trail in the direction we were headed.  However, we didn’t see any bears all day (well, until we spotted two black bears on the mountainside above the trailhead, after the hike).

Side note #2: at the top of the pass, a couple locals noticed our bear bells and told us that they believed the bells might be counter-productive – bears don’t identify the bells as human noise and aren’t scared off, and might actually be curious and come to investigate the unknown sound.  They said making lots of noise was the best bet by far.  And they also had a local joke for us - “how can you tell the difference between grizzly and black bear scat?  If it has jingly bells in it, it’s grizzly scat.”  And that was when we stopped using bear bells.

Day 5: we hadn’t yet seen any grizzlies and were leaving the park, so we drove to the Many Glacier area on our way out of the park.  Many Glacier is known for its high grizzly density.  We were not disappointed.  We saw two grizzlies, approximately 3 years old, playing in the water and catching fish, about 300ft from the road.  Better to meet them there than on the trail!

After we left, we both felt as though we had only scratched the surface of what the park has to offer.  The staggering beauty and isolated corners of the park only reachable by long hike made us desperately want to return.  Hopefully soon.

Yellowstone

Old Faithful and a rainbow in its mist

The Grand Prismatic Pool

Lower falls in the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River

Mammoth Hot Springs cascading travertine pools

After leaving Jackson, we spent the better part of 3 days in Yellowstone NP.  At the outset, we weren’t sure how much time we would need to see Yellowstone.  It’s a pretty big park, but we were staying about an hour drive away in Big Sky, so any day visits would require at least 2 extra hours of driving.

Well, it was fantastic enough that we spent (quite literally) every waking minute inside the park for 3 straight days.  We left our condo in Big Sky at dawn, and returned home at around 10 or 11pm on average.  We didn’t sleep all that much for those 3 days.

It started when we took the ‘scenic route’ from Jackson Hole to Big Sky – passing through Grand Teton NP and Yellowstone NP on the way up.  We hit the Yellowstone park boundary at probably 2pm.  From that point forward, we stopped on average about every 5 minutes to see some natural wonder or other.  And it turned out Old Faithful and the incredible lower geyser basin were on our way up as well.  So of course we had to stop and see it.  (We accidentally missed Old Faithful’s first eruption at around 6:30pm, and so had to wait until around 7:45 to see the next one.  Old Faithful is about a 2-2.5 hour drive from Big Sky.)

The best way to describe Yellowstone is . . . weird.  Over the next two days, we saw and did some simply incredible stuff:

In the geyser basins, bacteria grow in the thermal pools, each type a different color, able to live in a different band of temperature.  The colors therefore roughly indicate the temperature at various parts of the pool (blue for very hot, orange somewhere in the middle, brown for not that hot, etc.)  Some geysers were erupting constantly.  At Mammoth Hot Springs, hot water traveling up through limestone picks up minerals and precipitates them out as travertine, forming incredibly odd cascading pools (again filled with bacteria that color them rainbows).  Steam just comes up out of the ground all over the place, indicating the insane amount of thermal activity in the area.  We got to swim in a river that had hot spring runoff draining into it, creating natural spa-like water conditions.  We saw petrified trees.  We did a short hike along the rim of the ‘grand canyon of the Yellowstone’, a massive steep-walled canyon that has actual yellow stone walls.

And the wildlife.  We saw pretty much every animal on the ‘animal identification’ section of the visitor’s pamphlet.  Herds of bison, elk, moose, mule deer, a coyote, bald eagles, and our personal favorite, a set of pronghorn antelope.

When we planned this section of the trip, my dad was insisting we visit Yellowstone.  Now I know why – this is an incredible, bucket-list kind of place, where you can drive from one “wow!” to another “wow!” for days on end.

Jackson Hole #2

Kristen’s first fish!

Cara and Keenan all decked out for downhill mountain biking

We met up with my family in Jackson Hole, for a week-long vacation.  The group consisted of Kristen and myself, my mom, dad, sister Cara, and her boyfriend Keenan.

Again, the easiest way to describe the trip is day-by-day:

Day 1: everyone arrived in the afternoon and we rode the Jackson Hole gondola to the top of the mountain for some evening drinks (we were staying at a beautiful ski-in/ski-out condo right at the base of the mountain).

Day 2: Grand Teton National Park.  We all piled into the rented Ford Flex and went for a tour of the park.  The highlight of the day was the hike to Inspiration Point, above Jenny Lake.  This may have been my mom’s first experience with a ‘real’ hike – about 4-5 miles with a decent elevation gain.  She took about a billion pictures.  I think she liked it.  On the way back down, Keenan led us on a cross-country journey off the trail.

Day 3: my dad treated us all to a day of guided fly-fishing on the Snake River.  At first, I was skeptical that we could really fill 8 hours fly fishing.  But once we got going – man! – what a blast.  I could have stayed for another 8 hours.  There were 3 boats (one couple + guide per boat), and everyone caught multiple fish.  My dad held the honors of the day with 8 fish caught.  I had 5, and Kristen had 3.  At one point, Kristen and I started to fish a well-known hole, and an absolute monster nibbled at Kristen’s line – the guide estimated at least 22-24”.  We spent the better part of the next hour in a frenzy trying to catch him.  We probably went through 10 flies, taking turns to see if we could lure him out.  In the end, we had some nibbles from other big guys, but the monster became ‘the one that got away’.

Day 4: Keenan, Cara, Kristen, and I went downhill mountain biking in the morning.  It was Cara and Keenan’s first time riding mountain bikes, so they had to rent equipment.  We were expecting the rental to include helmets and bikes, but they ended up including full body armor.  Which was absolutely hilarious.  Cara and Keenan both wiped out once (they both learned all about braking while cornering) but nothing major.  Kristen and I did not buy lift tickets, so we were riding to the top of the downhill course each lap.  We were both bombing the downhills, even hitting some of the terrain features where possible, hardtails be damned.  I have to say, it was somewhat surprising that Kristen enjoyed downhill mountain biking, considering that just a couple months ago she hated going down the back sides of rollers.

After the morning’s activities, we drove up to Yellowstone, en route to our next condo in Big Sky.  We thought the drive would take only a few hours, but we ended up spending all afternoon (and most of the evening) snooping around Yellowstone.  The park is pretty much irresistible.

Las Vegas > Jackson, WY

Crack in the rock near petroglyphs at the Valley of Fire

I arrived in Las Vegas on Sunday night (Kristen and I stayed in the hotel room left over from the bachelorette party she was at over the weekend).  We picked up the car + bikes in the early afternoon on Monday and headed up to meet my family in Jackson Hole (we stopped in Provo for the night before completing the drive on Tuesday).

On the way, we stopped at the Valley of Fire state park, about an hour outside Las Vegas.  This is one of those places that qualifies as a ‘best kept secret’.  Most people spend their Vegas trip gambling, golfing, shooting automatic weapons at that insane gun range, or whatever.  But I’d bet almost nobody goes to see this place.  Too bad – it’s a wacky area of bright red stone just off the shore of Lake Mead.  There are petroglyphs, natural arches, and all sorts of other cool rock formations.  Well worth the trip.

Oh, and our car thermometer hit a new record high – 112F!

Go Congress – North Carolina

The two of us in uniform at the Pair Go competition

We spent a week in Black Mountain, NC (just East of Asheville) for the US Go Congress.  (Go is an Asian board game somewhat similar to Chess).

The Burralls are somewhat famous on the domestic Go scene, and the US Go Congress is the major event of the year, featuring multiple tournaments and activities.  Steve (Kristen’s dad) has been playing since he was a kid and introduced the family to the game.  Karoline (Kristen’s sister) was a tournament director at this year’s Congress.  Matt (Kristen’s brother) is one of the 50 best amateur players in the country.  Kristen is a strongly rated amateur as well.

We flew into Charlotte and rented road bikes for the week.  Black Mountain is in the Blue Ridge Mountains, so great road riding was plentiful.  We went for a ride nearly every day, including one monster 40 miler with upwards of 3,000ft of steep climbing.

The Congress itself was held at a large YMCA campus just outside of town.  Tournament play happened every morning, and most afternoons as well.  Kristen did not enter the tournaments, though, so we had mornings free to hang out around town and walk around the campus.  Rides happened in the afternoon, after Kristen’s dad was done with his daily tournament game.

The highlight of the week was definitely the Pair Go competition.  Though we were not playing in the major tournaments, Kristen and I were allowed to sign up for the Pair Go tournament on Thursday evening.  Pair Go is what it sounds like – instead of the typical 1-on-1 game, two co-ed pairs of people play each other.  Each player takes alternate moves, and the pairs are not allowed to communicate with each other.  So what ends up happening is that the strong player (Kristen) tries to execute a solid strategy, but every other move the weak player (me) screws it up.

Couples sometimes dress up for Pair Go.  So of course, we wore our matching Waffel bike kits.

Despite Kristen’s strong rating, our average rank was one of the lowest in the tournament.  Luckily, Karoline and Wentao also had one of the lowest combined ranks in the tournament as well.  We played them in our first game and somehow pulled out a win!  Confident from our victory, we promptly got destroyed by a 7 year old boy and a woman who hadn’t played much before, following a series of horrible mistakes by me.  Go is a humbling game.

California Coast

View near the lighthouse on Point Reyes

View of the Salinas Valley from our campsite

Us in Big Sur after spotting several California Condors

Kristen on her bike near Santa Barbara

After leaving Sacramento, we needed to get to the Las Vegas airport to catch our flights to North Carolina.  You can theoretically do the drive in 8-10 hours on the freeway, but we decided we wanted to do it right – drive the 1 down the coast.

The trip took 6 days:

Day 1: picked up our friend Matt in Berkeley and spent the day at Point Reyes (north of SF), then got Mexican food in the Mission and crashed on Matt’s couch.

Day 2: drove the coast down through Santa Cruz to do some mountain biking.  We ended up trying out (and subsequently buying) some 5.10 shoes and platform pedals.  For the past month, we’ve been hearing about how great platform pedals are for mountain biking and were curious.  We tried them out on a pretty flat trail on the bluffs overlooking the ocean.  They were awfully weird after using clipless shoes for so long, but we decided they were worth keeping.  We spent the rest of the afternoon in Santa Cruz, checking out the pier and the coast.  That night, we camped on the top of a hill at the Laguna Seca Raceway, with beautiful views of the mountains around Salinas and Monterey.

Day 3: had breakfast in Salinas and visited John Steinbeck’s childhood home.  We’re huge Steinbeck fans (especially after reading East of Eden, easily my favorite book of all time).  Then we went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium (even better than we both remembered), did the 17 Mile Drive through Pebble Beach and had a picnic on the grounds.  That evening, we drove down to a packed state park in Big Sur to cook some dinner and camp for the night.

Day 4: had breakfast at a roadside inn, and then did 2 hikes in Big Sur.  The first went up the coast range on a restricted dirt road, with views of the ocean.  After about 30-45 minutes, we decided the views were pretty but not worthy of Big Sur (Kristen: “this view sucks.”  Me: “we can see the ocean and mountains!”  Kristen: “this is BIG SUR, one of the most beautiful places in the world.  If I can’t even see the coastline, this hike is lame.  Let’s go to the bluffs.”  And she was right.  We hiked for a number of miles along the costal bluffs, and didn’t ever want to leave.  But duty called, and we drove down to Pismo Beach, set up camp just off the shore, got some tacos in town, and watched the sunset from the pier.

Day 5: drove down to Santa Barbara for some mountain biking just over the range above the city.  This was our first real ride with platform pedals, and results were mixed.  We had some difficulty at first getting our feet in the right place, but (at least for me), they proved their worth around the many sandy corners on the trail, as I often had to put my inside foot down to avoid slipping out.  Kristen had some solid issues with the sand as well, washing her front wheel out 4-5 times.  We’d been kicking the can down the road on buying her a new set of tires (she still had the set that came with the bike on there), so it looked like it was finally time to get her some extra grip.  The trail was super fun, though, with a 45 minute climb up, and miles of rolling singletrack on the way back down.  Afterward, we cleaned up and met Kristen’s friend Vicky for dinner in Santa Monica, then crashed on her floor.

Day 6: had breakfast with Kristen’s friend Gwen in Pasadena, then drove up to Las Vegas.  The temperature gauge in the car read a max of 110 degrees, our highest yet!  Since we would be leaving Vegas that night for a week, we needed to find somewhere to store our car and bikes.  Parking costs $30+ per day at the casinos, and we were nervous about security at other cheaper lots.  So, we dropped the bikes off for a tune-up at a local bike shop, then took the car in for some warranty maintenance and an oil change at the local Ford dealer, telling both we’d be back in a week to pick them up!