Park map again for reference. Actual route in/out is green slime colour. Intended route (where different) is orange. Start/end point is the star at the top right. Direction is clockwise.
Day 2. Woke up after a long but well-deserved sleep. We're not terribly early risers. By 8:30 the water was on for breakfast.
And what was for breakfast? Lasagna! It was a backpacking meal in a bag; you open the bag, add boiling water and let it sit for 10 minutes. (Saves on dishes.) We had tea while we waited impatiently; then, lasagna in a mug. It was sooo delicious!! Maybe just because anything would taste good at that point, but I'm still convinced it's simply a good dish.
It was a fairly lazy morning, and we weren't ready to roll until 11am.
The day before we had arrived at the clearing and not been able to locate where the trail continued. Scouting around revealed at least half a dozen animal trails leading away from the clearing. Well, after some looking, one of us noticed a marker on a tree, so with relief we were off, following the marked trail. Well refreshed, blisters freshly bandaged, ready for a day of hiking! Except 20 minutes in I noticed something...
I saw a pile of logs that looked all too familiar. I'd been seeing other things that gave me a nagging feeling, but by this point I was sure: we were backtracking. So we turned ourselves around and went straight back where we'd come from. Apparently if you're tired enough you don't pay a whole lot of attention to where you're going, which was the case at the end of our day 1 hike. Anyway, reaching the old camp spot again, we soon found the correct trail and were off again, having wasted only an hour of our day...
It took 45 minutes to reach what I assume is the Twin Buttes camp area. There's no sign to mark it, just a few stumps and a ring of rocks for a fire pit. We stopped for a snack before continuing on, but we weren't able to find the trail beyond this point. We were in a bit of a valley and decided to follow it in a westerly direction.
Twin Buttes in the background.
No trail, just snow and mushy ground...
...wonderful alpine colours...
Logs don't really rot here; instead they shrivel up and petrify. Here's a new tree growing out of an old stump.
We caught our first glimpse of the mountains in the core to which we were headed. It made me realize we needed to find an actual trail, since blindly bushwhacking straight west through valleys for a day or two was a lousy alternative.
As we were finally mostly above the tree line, I could make out various features detailed on my crappy topo map. It was now obvious we were a fair bit north of the trail (third star on the map). We decided to each head south at slightly different angles; presumably one of us would eventually come across the trail we needed to take west. Only one problem with this: we had been following a valley, and the slope to our south had gotten quite high and quite steep. So up the slope we trudged, on our separate ways.
It was a half hour before I spotted the first clue: a cairn (manmade pile of rocks). There were to be few visible trails above the tree line; cairns were the way to go from here on. I located Carrie and we rested up for a bit. The alpine wind was biting, so we wore our jackets for much of the alpine crossing.
We followed cairns westward, until finally we had a view of our destination, the park core.
About to peek over...
The vista at last.
Of course after reaching the highest elevation the only way to go is down. And downhill is often more taxing than uphill. Legs burn, toes get squished... in general one does not appreciate gravity the way one might expect. Here our walking sticks helped immensely; they steadied the descent and gave us something extra to lean on. Fortunately the ground was also cushioned with greenery, making the walk more bearable.
We still had to make our way well up the other side of the valley we were approaching.
Lower meant wetter. (Lower also meant a future climb, since any altitude we were losing would have to be regained later. But hey, if we don't like descending but we also don't like climbing, we probably should have just walked across Saskatchewan or something.)
There was a creek at the bottom of the valley that according to the map showed we should cross a couple of times close together before reaching a trail intersection. Having crossed it once, we failed to reach a second crossing. Fatigue bred doubt all too easily, and we wondered if we might have missed a turnoff somewhere. So at some point I took off my pack and scouted ahead for the intersection we sought. I was exhilarated that I could jog with abandon, unencumbered by a backpack full of creature comforts. Within minutes I found the turnoff ahead, so we would have hit it anyway had we continued in the first place. But it was a nice break. Now all that was left was a short but gruelling climb out of the valley.
The climb seemed surprisingly short, and we soon found ourselves at a key intersection not far from our destination campsite.
A mere 5 minutes later we were at the first lake, Pyramid. We had made it! Well, sort of. While camping outside the core is a free-for-all, inside the core camping is restricted to certain areas, so we still had to walk 10 minutes to the adjacent Lake of the Woods (leftmost star on the map).
A half-hearted victory pose.
So, after two days we had hiked 12 hours (excluding major breaks and the wrong-way start on day 2) for 28km. Sounds like slow progress, but to be fair it includes a net elevation increase of 1.5km and plenty of net-zero hikes and descents. All that with herds of blisters living on feet (her) and aching right knee and ankle (me). But hey, we made it alive!
After setting up camp, we managed to find the energy to cook a pasta meal and enjoy some hot chocolate. With or without Irish cream...
Shaving without a mirror... no reason to be all itchy, even at 6600 feet.
Lucky for us, the campground provided critter-proof cages for food storage, so no hanging of food in trees at night.
Then off to bed for another 12-hour snooze. (Sleeping was quite comfortable, although Carrie felt a little cold with temps in the single digits. Her borrowed air mattress also had a hole in it, which didn't help the comfort factor any.)
