Larching at Lake Louise
Early October, 2022
What is ‘larching’ you may ask. Before Henning and I went to Lake Louise, inadvertently during ‘larch season’, neither of us had heard the term. We had, however, for a number of years hiked Mt. Frosty in Manning Park in late September/early October to view the magnificent spectacle of golden alpine larches. The alpine larch is a coniferous tree that behaves like a deciduous tree in that its needles turn golden-yellow and drop off the branches every fall.
The fall of 2022 continued to be warm and dry. We’d had no rain in southern BC for the last 2.5 months. The poor salmon were dying before they could spawn and the earth was so parched that when the rain finally did come it caused all kinds of erosion problems. On our drive to Lake Louise in early October Henning and I witnessed north of Hope the massive construction projects that are still underway in response to last fall’s major flooding and landslides (earlier in the year we’d seen the devastation in the Fraser Canyon). Amazing, the billions of dollars that are being spent in response to climate change events because governments lack vision and courage and we continue to work towards mitigating climate change at a snail’s pace. And then there was all the Trans Mountain pipeline construction next to the highway - it made we want to cry. British Columbians fought so hard against this oil pipeline which doesn’t make any sense anymore (and never did, but even less so now!) OK, enough ranting.
We camped at the Illecillewaet Campground in Glacier National Park before continuing on to Golden where we had to take a detour due to closure of the road for an expansion to a 4-lane highway. It ended up taking us 10.5 hours driving time from New Westminster. As we neared Lake Louise we noted that every parking lot at a trailhead was packed (and cars lined the highway), but still we were astonished to learn that we couldn’t drive up to the Lake because the parking lot filled by 6 am! We would have to book a shuttle bus to the parking lots of Lake Louise and Moraine Lake along with hordes of people that had arrived for larching or larch season hiking! Foolishly, we’d assumed October would be low season in the Rockies and substantially less crowded than at the height of summer.
Unfortunately our room at the Lake Louise Hostel got the afternoon sun and heated up so much that we had to keep the window open all night and listen to the many night trains. Yet despite my poor sleep and annoyance with the throngs of people, we decided on two day hikes. The first day we hiked up Fairview Mountain. The trail left from the Lake Louise parking lot. The morning was chilly but it was a lovely blue sky day and the larches and scenery were stunning. Fortunately there weren’t too many people - perhaps due to the final strenuous climb. I found myself struggling the last few hundred metres of elevation and wondered if I was experiencing altitude sickness given that we were at around 2800 m.
The next day we took the Larch Valley Trail (leaves from the Moraine Lake parking lot) to the beautiful Minnestimma Lakes (small alpine tarns) and climbed to Sentinel Pass for a magnificent view overlooking Paradise Valley. This trail, unlike Fairview Mountain, was extremely popular and got busier as the day wore on. At the top of Sentinel Pass a young man encouraged others to stand at the edge of a steep precipice for a photo opportunity - social media mania! I couldn’t bare to watch so we headed back down. The scenery in the vicinity of Lake Louise was spectacular to be sure, but during larch season there were simply too many people for my liking.
View the Gallery Above or Slideshow Below for Additional Photos