Hey Folks,
I finally get a chance to catch up quickly here – it’s been one trip after another, and though the weather’s not been the best, the trips have all been a ton of fun. I’m heading out in a few days for another basecamp/photo trip, which should be great, and then the season is over – it’s gone WAY too quickly!
One of the highlights this year was our Bremner Mines to Tebay Lakes trip – the first ever commercial trip here, and one of the first groups of people to complete the route. We had an awesome group of experienced hikers, adventurous all, and we had a blast. The route was challenging at times, but enough long mellow stretches of easy hiking that we all enjoyed it. This photo was taken along the middle of the Klu River valley, where we passed through some amazing wildflowers stretches – it’s always a treat to see a great bloom of alpine flowers, but never more so than after you’ve been hiking over moraine and talus and through willow and dwarf birch for a few hours. The lupine here was fantastic.
We sure had a variety of weather on the route – our flight in to Bremner was delayed nearly 24 hours due to weather, and when we finally DID get in, a short hailstorm greeted us. We hiked the 25 minutes up to the Bremner Bunkhouse without too much chatting or laughing, all of us trying to keep tucked in from the hail. The weather pushed to a unanimous decision to spend the night in the bunkhouse, before heading out in the morning over the first pass. We ran into a short snow flurry the following morning, but had clearer weather after that – in fact, though we had cloud cover most of the time, we got almost no rain at all for the rest of the trip – 10 days! Awesome!!!! Nice cool weather with no rain. It was a little cloudy for great scenic photography, but the respite from precipitation was much welcome.
One of the favorite places was Harry’s Gulch, and the hiking the few miles east and west of that – a sweet section of mountain terrain, for sure. Certainly the bear trail up in the pass was WAY cool – a narrow trail where individual footprints, embedded in the soil over millenia, reflect the steps of countless grizzly bears, each walking in the footprints of the predecessors. But I think for me the Klu River valley was the most scenic – and I look forward to hopefully getting the opportunity to photograph that area a little more in the future. I’m fairly certain, on the other hand, that everyone agreed the alder was the least likable hiking – but we were lucky, I think, and didn’t hit as much of that as we might have had our route been a little different.
The finish was great, with a quick bushwhack down to Tebay Falls, some blueberries, and a relatively easy walk over to the lake for our final campsite. Tebay falls are really something else.
I think this trip will become a classic hike over the next few years – I’m looking forward to running it again and learning it a bit better, and exploring the area further. There’s no doubt the terrain and scenery is on par with any I’ve seen – really a fantastic hike. A huge thanks to Mike, Sergei, Sveta, Geoff and Jodee for coming along on this trip – I couldn’t ask for a better group to do such a hike – you guys were all awesome, thank you.
Cheers
Carl