Plank Road: Lake O’Hara

July 22, 2014

It takes pre-planning to get into Lake O’Hara as Parks Canada restricts the number of visitors. You have to call the office in Field three months in advance to the day you want to go to Lake O’Hara. The phone lines are jammed, last year, by the time I got through, no space was available. This year, I decided I would hit re-dial for an hour, luckily I got through in 45 minutes and was able to book a ride on the bus and three nights camping. I booked the 8:30 a.m. bus so we had to get our gear packed, hauled out to the car and drive to the Lake O’Hara parking lot, thus we got up at 6:00 a.m. to get underway. It was really damp at Takakkaw so our tent and everything else were soaked.

When we got to the bus stop there were a lot of day hikers who had not booked a seat, they were hoping for no-shows so they could claim a seat on the bus. Unfortunately, everybody showed up so the day hikers were out of luck but they had the option of hiking the 11 km road in and could get a bus back out at the end of the day.

Parks Canada uses a couple of school buses to take day hikers and campers into Lake O’Hara. There were only two other people on the camping bus besides us. When we got to the campsite, we dropped our gear, picked a site and then set up our tent.

We needed to let the tent dry out before we could set up our mattress so we headed to the communal cooking area to make tea. You are not allowed to eat or cook in the tenting area so there are bear-proof food lockers, picnic tables and cooking shelters in the communal area. The communal cooking area is great as it provides ample opportunity to meet people and chat. We met many wonderful people at O’Hara and had fantastic conversation.

After tea, we set up our mattress and sleeping bags and then took off on foot down the road to Lake O’Hara, the camping area is about a km from the lake. The lake is stunningly beautiful. We walked the trail around part of the lake to the trailhead to Wiwaxy Gap. Then we started the relentless climb to Wiwaxy, it was brutal. Luckily the Iceline did not completely trash our legs as I had anticipated, so we were able to trudge up to Wiwaxy Gap. The views from the gap are spectacular.

The clouds rolled in as we reached the gap and there was a cool wind so we sat on the rocks on the backside, out of the wind, and ate some of our lunch. We put on our jackets and headed for the trail across the Huber ledges. This is a great trail, you wonder how on earth anybody picked out a trail across the ledges, for when you look at the Huber ledges from the bottom or from across the way, you cannot imagine it is possible to traverse them.

The trail ends up at the gorgeous Lake Oesa. We relaxed on the rocks at Lake Oesa and ate the remainder of our lunch. I really wanted to hike the Yukeness Ledges, but we decided to head back to camp as it was threatening rain and we were fairly bagged after hiking the Iceline the previous day. I had hoped to hike the ledges in the next few days but we never got the opportunity, so we should have hiked the Yukeness ledges right away.

Lake O'Hara