Rockwall: Floe Lake

On Saturday morning, Bonnie, Sean, Sarah, Garrett and I started up the Floe Lake trail on the Rockwall hike in Kootenay National Park.Lately, it seems like Garrett and I have a hankering to hike in Kootenay National Park! Our other hike up to Fay glacier and Neil Colgan hut was also in Kootenay National Park.We did, however, want to do the Iceline trail in Yoho National Park, however all the sites on that trail were booked, so the Rockwall was our second choice.


After hiking along the burned out forest valley for 8 kms, with some ups and downs along the way, we reached the climax of the hike: 700m elevation gain over 2 kms. You can see part of our climb in the picture below. The photo is looking up at the outflow river from Floe Lake, which is around the corner to the right in the picture. We climbed up the switchbacks on the right side of the picture, through the forest.Once done struggling up the hill, we reached the Floe Lake campground. Voila! Floe Lake, in all its resplendent glory.Garrett and Sarah, by the lake.I liked this rock.We explored farther down the beach and took some more pictures.That's me!Me still!I came back. Now I'm close. Bonnie and Sean are in the background.After exploring, we sat down and made some dinner.Mmmm! Teriyaki chicken with rice!Sarah couldn't leave her technology behind completely. We made her turn off the music when she tried to play her phone-mp3 player, though.After dinner, Garrett and I washed some dishes and filtered some water at a nearby stream. You can see the ranger's cabin in the background.I made a little movie of this little ducky while Garrett filtered the water.

After cleaning up, we settled in to play some cribbage over hot chocolate and tea. The temperature had started to drop as soon as the sun set behind the mountains, and we were expecting from the weather forecast that it would get cold and possibly rainy/snowy. Thus, when these clouds rolled in, we weren't totally surprised:We also made a movie of the impending snow.

I climbed into our tent shortly after cleaning up our stuff and putting our bags on the bear pole. I knew it was going to be cold that night, so I started out with lots of layers! In the below picture, you can see my two layers of socks, my black fleece pants and my green underlayer in between them.I also took a picture of myself, with my toque on, plus my black underlayer, my pajama top and my fleece jacket. I was bundled up!By the end of the night, I took off several of the layers, but the key things was that I was basically WARM all night!