Mount Robson 4

We spent our last day in the mountains hiking out of them. In one day, we were to do the whole 21 km's that we had taken two days to climb on the way in. This may seem extreme, but it was all downhill, so we figured we could manage it. In addition, Garrett had hiked this same trail out in one day before without any problems. So, off we went, retracing our steps.The first segment of the hike was fairly fine, as it was quite flat overall. We stopped for a quick break and walked out to the Emperor Falls lookout, to see this spectactular waterfall:It truly was impressive. And wet!! The spray blew off the waterfall in a large radius, necessitating our raincoats. It's just too bad I can't share the sound of the waterfall with you as well!The hike downhill was actually a lot more difficult than we expected. Since it had rained the night before (big surprise), it was muddy and slick in a lot of places. We made our way at as fast a pace as we could manage, but sometimes it was tricky. As we went down, we were often impressed that we had, in fact, climbed UP this just the other day. It was so steep!

At one of our brief breaks down, Garrett took some pictures of me below Mount Robson. This was a little less than we saw of the mountain at other points on our trip, however we didn't manage to see the top of the mountain once over the four days we were there. It's too tall!This is looking back toward Emperor Falls.As we went down, down, down, we approached Kinney Lake again.We stopped for a brief break there before continuing on. By this point, we were getting pretty tired and sore, but we only had 7 km's left so we kept trucking. Here are a few picture of Kinney Lake:Awhile later, we reached the 4 km marker. So close, yet so far! The trail had widened and smoothed out, but those last 4 km's lasted so long! We were tired to so we stopped for another break, approximately 3 km's from the car:There were day hikers all along the trail, and we ran into an elderly couple hiking up for a view of Mount Robson. They saw us with our bags, poles and gators, and said 'Oh my, you sure came prepared.' I'm not sure if they thought we were carrying all that stuff for a day hike, or were just being silly...but still...

We were so excited when we finally got to the bridge (and thus, to the parking lot!). Hooray! Our hike was over and it was time to take off our hiking boots.