Today Jeff and I went for a hike in the Buntzen Lake area. I am a hiking newbie still but Jeff kindly furnished me with a walking stick for additional stability, balance and to fend off marauding bears.
Rather than hike around the lake itself, which has an elevation gain of a little over 100m, Jeff plotted a course up the Halvor Lunden trail which would take us up to the top of Eagle Ridge and a total elevation climb of about 1020m. We made pretty good time heading up but somewhere past 600m up the trail became snow-covered. Normally this would not be an issue but the cover was fairly thin and had frozen, making it pretty much ice. Just past Polytrichum Lookout at 680m or so, the trail becomes very steep and narrow and the ice was a little unforgiving without having claws of steel attached to your boots. After continuing up a ways we elected to turn around and head back down.
Although it didn’t seem like we had climbed very far up Treacherous Icy Slope, making our way back down took longer than expected, with each step falling into the ‘be very careful so you do not go head-first the rest of the way down’ category.
We arrived safely back in the park and ate lunch in the sun at Buntzen Lake proper. For five minutes. Not that we finished lunch in five minutes, that’s how long the sun shone on our table before it moved on. Pesky winter sun. Everyone in the area seemed to have a camera. I did, too, and took some pics, which can be found in the Buntzen Lake gallery.
Here is one of them, a close-up shot of The Pulpit, the rocky outcropping at the top that we did not quite reach.
[singlepic id=125 w=640 h=480 float=none]It was an enjoyable outing despite not ultimately reaching our goal. There were no falls, bears and the weather was about perfect for this time of year — sunny and a touch above freezing with no wind.