Mount Robson 3

Sorry for the delay, but here are the next set of photos from our hike in Mount Robson.

We woke up for our day hike at a reasonable time Saturday morning. We awoke to this beautiful view of the mountains and lake: We ate breakfast and set out on the trail up Toboggan falls, which was actually quite steep and a hefty climb. The falls were really neat because they had many different types of water falls and water flow throughout it's several hundred meter descent. Halfway up, we came across this little critter:He was a little bit shy, but we waited for him to come out and snapped some good pictures of him. He was good at posing:We postulated for most of the day as to what he actually was, since he was quite a bit larger than any marmots Garrett and I had seen before. However, later that evening one of the other hikers told us he is a hoary marmot. So, there you go, now we know.
Here are some more shots of Toboggan Falls:Near the top of the falls was the most impressive waterfall of Toboggan Falls, so we took some pictures there.We climbed up and up and up, until we were above the tree line. Our goal was a cave up at the top, which was recommended to us by Joelle and other hikers. The view was quite impressive from up that high:Here we are in front of the cave:The cave was quite low to climb in to, but immediately the floor dropped away and it was high enough to stand up in easily. The main part of the cave went back about 30 meters, and was quite dark (we brought our headlamps) and really, really wet inside. The walls, roof and floor were all wet. We took some pictures inside, which turned out surprisingly well since we couldn't see where we were aiming when we took them.Halfway down the cave and off to the left was a narrow side passage that led into a string of three or four other rooms (I wouldn't know, since I was too scared to go all the way to the end. But Bonnie and Garrett went all the way in). Here is the passageway:Looks scary, hey? In any case, it was really neat and even though I don't really care for caves, I really liked the experience. Afterwards we climbed up just a bit higher and took a photo of the Robson glacier, since we were just able to see it from where we were (it's just right of centre in the photo below):Next, we hiked all the way back down to the trail junction at the top of Toboggan Falls, which took surprisingly little time compared to hiking up it! We took the trail towards Halgreave Lake and stopped for lunch by a little stream:After lunch, we hiked along a relatively uneventful, although pretty, trail with lots of wildflowers and more of the same view of the moutains/glacier as I have already shown several times. Eventually the trail came to the lateral moraine of the Halgreave glacier. We climbed up the moraine to take a look at the glacier and its lake:It was a good looking glacier, with a really blue hue to it. At the top, we also saw more hoary marmots kicking around:
These guys weren't very scared of us at all, and were busy licking the rocks up there, presumably for salt, although we weren't really sure.The hike down was steep but not terribly strenuous. We were back at camp around 3:30pm and relaxed and played some cards in the chalet, to pass the time. It was a fairly uneventful evening, although the weather turned fairly foul later on, so we didn't want to go outside. We did see this little guy wander into camp, though:We set the alarm for quite early the next day, since we had to hike out all 21km's in one day, rather than the two we took to hike in. Luckily it was downhill for the majority of the trail, but it was still a long distance, and after our hike we had to drive back to Edmonton still. So, early to bed, early to rise.