This is a tale of exuberant youth, and wisdom that comes with age. If you have been reading our previous posts, you might agree with me that everytime I write it sounds like we are gushing over everything we have seen. Each post we seem to find something more fantastic, see something more extraordinary, something more amazing. Some of you have been very kind to post comments about all the cool things we have experienced and seen.
We started this blog to help us remember all the details of what we had seen and done. As we get older when we look back the things get jumbled. Did that happen when we were here with Janice Shannon and her crew or was that with Rick and Doug?
I can tell you sincerely that for all the wonderful things we have seen and done so far, the last four days have surpassed them. If I become addled with age and cannot think straight to recall the bike rides or the times in Glacier, or Waterton and I need someone read me the old blog and tell me, "Look Steve, you wrote in 2015 that you saw a bear near the Prince of Wales hotel", I will have the memory of these last four days burned deep into my brain. Other than my wedding day, the days spent creating and birthing my children, the 1969 and 1986 Mets World Series wins, and that day in Gampel when the UCONN Women beat Tennessee for the first time, these have been the best four days in my life.
We left the luxury digs of the HI/ACC hostel at Lake Louise on Tuesday morning. We had spent late Monday afternoon into the evening organizing our packs, sorting and dividing up four days of food all to be ready for an early start up the Yoho Valley Road to the parking lot at the base of Takakkaw Falls. The road is twisty with two hairy hairpin turns, but the thundering cascade of the 300 meter falls was worth the white knuckles. The falls is the outflow of a lake fed by the Daley Glacier. it is actually a two stage falls with the first cascade hitting something up there and sending it out in a 254 meter free fall to the base. Its roar made it difficult to talk to each other in the parking lot as we gathered our things. We met a couple of interesting fellows as we left. They will be the subject of another post.
I also experienced my first taste of the exuberance of youth. We were headed to ACC Stanley Mitchell Hut in the Little Yoho Valley. The trail junctions we were headed to were described by Patton and Robinson as tricky. So, with a tear in my eye, I took my Swiss Army knife and carefully sliced out the 5 or 6 pages of the "bible" to take with us up to the hut. Katie looked over my shoulder and said, "Oh yeah, I took pictures of those pages with my phone." Kids these days.
Trail at the end of the parking is the terminus of many routes that take you into the delights of the Yoho Valley. At the beginning you follow the access road to the Takakkaw Falls campground which is self service and first come first serve. It was going to be one of our options for a place to camp on our day out, but by happenstance Marsha had checked with hostel and found that there was a family room available on that day, so we skipped the campout and grabbed the room. We did check out he campground for future reference. It is a .2 km walk in and there is a cart where you can lug your stuff down the road to a tent site. Water from the gray glacier fed Yoho River, to be filtered or boiled and pit toilets. It has a kitchen shelter. We learned later that for a winter trip when the access road from Trans Canada 1 is closed, folks ski the 13 km up the road and camp in the kitchen shelter and then head out to other destinations up valley. The walk in without snow was not bad.
Beyond the campground, the trail follows along a roadbed on the broad flat alluvial plain of the river for a while, then turns up and scabs the side of a hill steeply. It gets your heart going.
The trail does flatten out after a while, and leads down to the Laugh Falls Campground, where of course the outflow of Laughing Falls which takes the flow of the Little Yoho River and delivered it to the Yoho. Laughing Falls is tent sites scattered around the all alluvial debris of this part of the Yoho River. No kitchen shelter, water from the river but a very nice, new pit toilet. It was a pretty busy place with many tent sites filled.
Out trip now took us up the hill that formed Laughing Falls on the Little Yoho Valley Trail. Just a heavy stepping one foot after the other, turn at the switchback, move up again, turn at the switchback and move up again. It was a chore and a half, but after the initial surge it tapered off a bit so that your heart was no longer pounding in your ears, just merely pounding out of your chest. It was long and tedious but in the end not overwhelming. Katie had her FitBit tracking her walking and the trip up was worth 182 flights of stairs.
Stanley Mitchell Hut sits on the edge of a meadow hard by terminal moraines formed off the flanks of several 3000 meter peaks, that ring the Little Yoho Valley. The hut and the meadow are broad and green, but once you leave the valley floor you are up into alpine tundra of scree and rock. There is an camping area just up valley if you do not have a spot at the hut.
You can see right away that it is an alpinist hut build in the ACC tradition of placing huts in places that support technical ascents of peaks. From the warm secure hut you can strike out and summit several peaks that ring the valley.
The hut itself is very nice. Complete kitchen with gas stoves, pots and pans and all the kitchen utensils you need. Water is pulled from the stream outside and boiled. The creek also serves as a refrigerator. There is a small bunkroom that fits eight, and an attic loft up a ladder that sleeps another 16 or so. The common area has tables and benches and a woodstove. It is a fine place to stay, well used and signs that tell you how everything works. Whatever group is there quickly figures out the routines of hut life and works cooperatively to share chores and kitchen time.
We settled in with our hutmates. The first night there were a couple of families, a guided group that was learning technical mountaineering, and other groups that were using the hut as a base.
The second morning we chose to head up the meadow to climb up to Kiwetinok Pass, a col that would offer views back across to the two high peaks, The President and the Vice President, and views down valley to the peaks to the east. A perfect cloudless day with cool temps and a little breeze.
The exuberants lead off, charging up the valley, with the old folks bringing up the rear. Thier strong legs led them to the bottom of the scree and the streams that flowed down from the glaciers. They had heart, they had courage, they did not have a map. The old folks did. After a few minutes watching their path from far below it was pretty clear that the Wayward Johnsons had gone up the wrong drainage. Too much thundering water, too much wind to call them back, to exuberant to look back over their shoulders to see the old folks far below waving and pointing at the valley now far to our right leading to the visible and obvious pass that was now getting further and further away. We were headed pretty straight toward the glacier that hung off the President on the route the peak baggers took to use the glacier as the route to the summit. We were not inclined by temperament nor by equipment and experience to make a summit attempt, but we pressed on up the moraines, the exuberant Wayward Johnsons hopping over rocks, bounding over streams, climbing up the sides of cascading water, the old folks far below, muttering under their breath and carefully placing one foot after the other.
In the end as always, folly rewards youth, and serendipity often leads to its own reward. As the intend pass stayed to the west, the height of the moraine at the outflow of the glacier was reached. first by the exubernt legs, sometime later by the old ones. It was glorious. The flanks of the President offered views down valley, and to the peaks and associated glaciers of the Waputuk Icefield to the east. Clear as a bell, not a cloud in the sky, warm but not too warm and a cooling breeze. The mountains seeming so close that you could reach out and touch them, yet so far away. The Wayward Johnstons were forgiven.
We marveled at the glacier and wondered at the tortured geology. The mountain had a lot of sedimentary shale that had been lifted. In one area, a huge bulb of underlying granite had pushed up under the shale, bending it into a horseshoe but not breaking it.
Too soon it was time to descend, but which way down? We did some scrambling down the scree slopes, picking and choosing the least steep and least scary routes. Tricky and nerve racking.
I am being called to a lovely breakfast so I will finish this post and pick up the tale in Part 2. We have decisions to make today. It has been thundering and lightning in Lake Louise all night. We are scheduled to move 3 hours north into Jasper for tent camping the next three nights, however, they have room for us here at the hostel. Time to rouse the Wayward Johnsons for this no brainer.
