It was a long hike day. A total of 19km with 850m elevation gain starting at around 1700m and summiting a hair above 2250m. The weather was gorgeous, the views beautiful, and the loop was perfectly paced.
Over the first 3.4km, we made our way to the Lake Agnes Teahouse. It’s a fairly travelled hike up to Mirror Lake, which would be more aptly named Hazy Puddle. Then, you keep going up to Lake Agnes. The first rest stop is the tea house. The chai latte made the whole segment very civilized, if not a little colonial. Having people haul milk, tea, and food all the way there so that we don’t have to convey the feeling of an English explorer with his Sherpas. Once you realize that 2 cups of tea and two chocolate cookie squares cost nearly $20, the feeling subsides a little, and it can make one feel they are in the wrong line of business.
From Lake Agnes tea house, it’s a quick jaunt around the lake and then up to a tight series of switchbacks to make it on the other side of the saddle. It’s probably the most challenging part of the hike as it’s essentially up a wall. On the other side, after the traditional pictures of Lake Louise, you start seeing a lot more of the glaciers. You make your way down to meet the trail coming up from Lake Louise and go back up to the Plane of Six Glaciers tea house. It’s around 7km, and it’s beautiful!
The second teahouse is a great spot to take a break, recharge, and then push on for the next 2.6km (1.3km there and back) to the Abbot Pass Viewpoint to see the glaciers up close and personal. Walking on the spine of a moraine with 60km/h winds adds that little dose of adrenaline missing from the experience. The view of a desolate landscape carved by the glaciers is really worth the risk.
The final way down to Lake Louise, like the first way up to Lake Agnes, showcases the diversity of the people hiking in the area. You’ll see people with a full 40-litre pack, ready to camp at the first opportunity, mountain climbers looking for the right boulder to ascend, and the family in blue jeans and sweatshirts going to the tea house and wondering why they would want to walk that far. If nothing else, it’s entertaining.
During the entire hike, there’s an opportunity to take gorgeous pictures at every step. You start by expressing how big the glacier or mountains are, then how far away all of that is, and then you’ll get into how small you are in comparison to them. You’ll finally have no words to describe it. That’s what makes this hike awesome. Also, that’s how we ended up with many hundreds of pictures of the same rock formations and glaciers from slightly different angles. We loved every one of them, and picking our favourite almost ended in a couple of recitals of ”Eeny, meeny, miny, moe”.
Tomorrow we’re making our way to Jasper. We initially didn’t expect to go all the way there, but turns out, we can cover a lot of the big things to see in the region quite quickly.