Waterton with The Sisters

15 06 2010

Bertha Lake and Mount Galwey, Waterton Lakes National Park, June 5-6, 2010

We were recently blessed with having both my twin sister, Christa, and Mike’s sister, Charlie, over for a visit. Charlie comes across the pond every year for “boot camp” as she calls it- basically Mike drags her on the most brutal hikes and backpacks he can think of, and she gets an awesome Mountain workout before returning to her city life. My sister is in her 4th year of veterinary school, and what better place to get beef cattle experience than Alberta?

For the weekend that they were both here, we wanted to get as much mountain time as possible. Banff looked rainy all weekend, but Waterton looked beautiful, so our choice was made! Our friend Joey came along too. After an exceedingly leisurely morning, we finally picked the perfect camp site and decided to get in a “quick hike” before dinner. Most of the trails were still snowed in, so we decided on Bertha Lake.

The Bertha Falls trail is a very popular hike from the Waterton townsite. The trail winds along the lake shore, with some excellent views over the lake, then up the canyon at a gentle grade to the falls at about 4k. Bertha Falls are beautiful, although much smaller than Cameron Falls which you drive past to get to the trailhead. Most groups, especially families with kids, just turn around at the falls. We decided to venture a bit further to Bertha Lake, another 4k up. After the falls the trail gets a bit steeper and winds up the valley. We were fortunate that most of the snow was gone, and what was there was easy to kick steps into. As we neared the top of the valley there were some gorgeous views out east over the praries. We finally got to the lake, which was still iced over and snow-covered, but beautiful tucked into a big cirque with rock cliffs on all sides. We sat on the rocks overlooking the lake and soaked in the sun, then headed back down.

Since the hike took us about 3 hours, we were pretty hungry by the time we got back to our campsite! Because we were car camping, we decided we would go all-out with dinner. We got a roaring fire going, and we cooked up some chopped veggies in foil, roasted corn on the cob, grilled (and slapped) some amazing Alberta steaks. SO much food, I couldn’t even begin to eat it all! But it was SOO delicious. After dinner and s’mores, we contemplated what hike we would do on Sunday. Most of the hikes were still snow-bound so we had considered doing Tick Ridge on Mt Crandall, until Christa looked up at the tall, craggy yellow peak towering over our campsite and said, “Let’s do that one!”. We looked it up on the map, and it was actually in our Scrambles of the Canadian Rockies book- Mount Galwey. It was listed as a difficult scramble, but most of the difficulties were in one or two tricky moves on the rock bands near the top.

The morning dawned hot and sunny as we unloaded at the trailhead for Galwey. After last year’s tick fiasco, we were worried about trekking through tall grass, but there turned out to be a very nice trail up through the grassy slopes. The trail rose quite steeply but the deep red rock bands characteristic to Waterton provided some flatter areas that were a nice reprieve from the climbing. We immediately got amazing views of the valley which just got better and better as we climbed. Eventually, we came out onto a final wide shoulder. Above us was a wide, smooth scree slope, crowned by rock cliffs- this gives Galwey a distinctive look from this south approach.

Here I have to make a confession- for the last year or two, I’ve developed something like vertigo or panic attacks when I am on big, smooth, steep slopes. No idea why this has started terrifying me, but I kind of freaked out as we started up the scree slope on Galwey, so I went back down to the shoulder while the rest of the group soldiered on to the final cliffs. There I made friends with some chipmunks while the others continued. After the scree slope, the trail scrambles over some good, solid rock, with a few rather airy drops below. Christa, Charlie, Mike, and Joey had fun peeking through a natural window in one of the cliffs at the top, where the wall is narrow enough for some of the rock to have crumbled away. Joey and Mike braved the last few hairy 5th class moves to get to the top. Christa and Charlie wisely hung back, but got to laugh at the boy’s summit dance moves. From my vantage point below I could see some tiny figures boogying at the top.

Finally the group wandered their way back down and picked me up. It had been a long day, and an amazing weekend! Thoughts of Chicken on the Way carried our feet back down the steep slopes and back to Calgary.