Pocket Lake and thanks to National Geographic

Pocket Lake

Well, well, well…It’s August, 2010 and somehow this is my first blog entry. Instead of recounting my reasons for being so busy, I will recount the lake that jarred loose the keyboard.

Pocket Lake

Oh, but before I do that, I want to thank the people at National Geographic. In three days (August 30, 2010), there will be a documentary called Glacier National Park – Wild Spaces that will make its debut on the National Geographic Channel.

Any of you who love the park, have interest in the wild corners of the world, or just want to see me with a farmers tan jumping in cold water should tune in.

It is about the park in general, but for me it marks the first national exposure of the Waterton Glacier Lake Jumping Project. I’m obviously out of my mind excited!!!

So, where was I…?

Oh, Pocket Lake.

So, for the first time in this busiest of summers, my now wife Jess and I went on a backpacking trip. You get three days off together around here and you jump on it.

The trip started off in the tiny outpost of Goat Haunt which is accessed by going to Waterton National Park in Alberta.

We caught a tour boat back down to the southern end of the lake. From there, we struck off to the west towards an amazing area called Boulder Pass.

On the way to our first night of camping, we cooled off in Thunderbird Pond. This lake is on the list, but I got to it many years ago. Still good for a nice dip.

The first evening we camped at Brown Pass Campground which is just above Bowman Lake.

It has been a little while since we had been up in these parts so both Jess and I were super excited.
There was a bountiful crop of Montana’s famous huckleberries. Its funny. Although they keep you going, they also seriously slow you down.

But, there is no better distraction. Bears have it figured out, folks.

So, the next morning we drug our tent a few miles up hill to a site called Hole in the Wall. From here we continued up hill, the trail meandering through the rock bands to Boulder Pass.

Would you believe that in the earlier parts of the 1900’s this whole picture would have been filled with Boulder Glacier and the trail had to lead up on the moraine in the right hand side of the picture.
Lots of things have changed around these parts since then.

Its amazingly open up on top of Boulder Pass. It is so newly melted out that there is no vegitation hardly at all. Just open views!!

Just over the pass we had to go off trail to the top of a ridge.

At the bottom was the long awaited Pocket Lake.

We had to drop off of this ridge and work our way through some cliff bands, steep grass and flower filled slopes to get to the lake.
I don’t have any pictures of our way through the cliff bands. That is probably because I did not like it.

Funny thing about never being somewhere before. You almost always pick the less than perfect route.
Sometimes, you end up finding yourself with your heart racing as you hold onto a tree limb and try to scoot yourself down a wet rock band covered in moss. Just sayin’….Sometimes that happens…

Jess kept her cool and pulled me through. You’re the best! We made our way along a huge bench above the lake and then down broken cliff bands and grassy slopes down to the lake.

The lake was amazing. Somehow we scored three spectacular days of sunshine and calm weather. This would have been impossible if the storms moved in on us. This is one of the highest elevation lakes in the whole park.

So, I’d like to give a little shot out to the weather….
Lets give it up for the weather!!

Thanks everyone.

We still had to get out of this enormous “pocket” though. So since we were losing daylight we had to head out and climb back up to the pass.

Thankfully, there was a much more pleasant way back through the cliffs. Its always upon return that you figure this stuff out. We had to make our way back along the shelf to the grassy ramp in the top middle of the picture.

We knew it was “the way in” when we saw that there was a nice animal path up the ramp. Steep and slippery, but well more straight forward.

Once back up top, we bid Pocket Lake farewell and headed on. We still had miles to make.

The view from atop Boulder Pass looking back towards Goat Haunt is about as good as it gets in the park. Wow!!

And with the last hour or so of sunlight for the day, we dropped back down to camp. The light softening the colors on the peaks we were surrounded by.

To finish the story, we made a late morning of it the next day. Felt like we earned a bit of sleeping in.

Good bye Boulder Pass. Good bye, Bowman Lake. Good bye, Goat Haunt.

I would like to point out to anyone reading this blog for the first time, that I have many past adventures to read about. So, continue sifting through the blog. Check out all of the other parts of the website too. www.firstgiving.com/glacierlakejumps

Anyone that has searched out the Waterton Glacier Lake Jumping Projects website, Welcome!!

I’ve been trying to harness this project to raise awareness for childhood cancer and to raise money for Camp Mak A Dream. I have been working on the project for seven years now.

So, thanks for popping by.

If you donate,….well your awesome.

If you check out the site and enjoy yourself enough to tell others then, you are Awesome too.

I have 34 lakes left after the six I’ve done this summer so far. I’ll keep plugging if you keep reading and following along.

Till then, I bid you farewell.

To Life,

Marc Ankenbauer

Upper Rowe and Linham Lakes

This is a story about last summer. I never got a chance to create a blog for this until now. So, hope you enjoy a backlogged lake blog (say that ten times).....until I get something new for the year. Hope to a new lake before the end of May. Stay Tuned

So the story goes...............

Tradition has it that once, and it seems to be only once a year my friend Kieth and I go for a hike. He works for the boat company in Waterton and we tend to have contrasting schedules all summer. We were able to keep tradition going once again with an awesome day in late August.

We completed a feat that I have only had success with once before. We got five lakes in one day. It takes putting a large effort in, but more so it takes a cluster of lakes to be able to pull that off.

This project is about the lakes and the park, well more than my or anyone else’s efforts. If they want to allow things to progress. then I progress.

If not, then we kindly say thanks and slowly plod along to one lake at a time…. If you’re lucky.

So luckily the upper Rowe Lakes and the Linham Lakes are in general vicinity of each other in the middle of Waterton National Park.

We headed off pretty late in the day. I bet we did not hit trail till about 11:30 or noon. We had lots to do in a short amount of time. Up the Rowe valley till the Upper Rowe Lakes trail took a big, uphill left turn. I had done the single lower Rowe Lake last year, so to acquire the top two was a great hit for me.

We found a little bay behind a rock to take a dip because the wind was kickin hard. After it we walked the outlet creek to the middle lake.

What a lovely day for a bunch of dips. This would have been a brutal one if it were nasty weather. Five lakes would get terribly chilly going at it in the rain.

There is a nice goat trail that connects the Upper Rowe lakes trail with the upper reaches of the Rowe valley trail. It was nice because we did not have to drop that whole way back into the valley bottom.

We had to push up to Linham ridge and find a spot to hop over the other side of it. We envisioned that we just had to get to the prominent saddle and head down from there.

When we finished the huge uphill slog we got up to that saddle and there was a 2000 foot cliff on the other side.

Alright…Keep looking.

I had always been told that there was a perfect goat trail heading down to these lakes.

Gotta try and find it.



So, folks…

“Go find the off trail lake insight #73”

Sometimes you find the ideal way to the lake. But more often, you find the ideal way back from the lake. Often, you just find "A" way to the lake”….

This was one of those days.
On top of the ridge we saw a goat trail. Why not try it…Time is of the essence. Just go!!!

“Go find the off trail lake insight #74”

Albeit I owe this entire project to the goat trail leaving goats. There are lots of goat trails. Not all of them are going the direction you want to be going. There is always paths going in the general direction of any body of water. But there are also paths going down a shelfy, rotten rock infested chute also..

Goats are much better at this than you or I.

I promise.

Well, we had to follow through with it though. There was no more time to fiddle and fuss about a better route, we did not leave the excess time for that kind of thing on this day.

So, we just dropped off a crumbling, steep ridge.

Eeehh……

I’ve since seen where we should have gone. This was not it. But this was the ridge we dropped down. From upper left to lower right.
It did work though..

Once down we started just busting through these lakes. There are three of them.

We did not have time to dilly dally…

Enter that whole, we started at noon thing. It is becoming an important part of our trip

So, we hit the first lake which was pretty obvious. We were looking at it all the way down.

After him though, we started moving pretty frantically around this hanging basin trying to find the other two and waste as little time as we could.

There is an efficient and optimal way of doing anything in life. Finding and jumping in remote mountain lakes while working with serious time constraints is no different.

The second lake was over a wooded ridge.

The sun kept falling and creating that soft colorful light on all the rock walls around us. It is lovely, but when you know you have a long way to travel before you are back at the trailhead and in your car. It only creates a bit of anxiety.

Then, off in the completely opposite direction of our exit out of this valley to find the last one. It was right above the cliffs that drain the hanging basin. They drop off into Linham Falls.

There once was a trail up the face of the headwall that holds the lakes in place. It must have had a few cables and chains to hold on to along the sketchy route. At least one person fell to their death through the years, though. Needless to say, no one goes that way any longer.

Not being able to go that way, forced the “random, over the ridge and drop in" route to get to these lakes that we had to take. No matter how difficult it was to get here, at least we did not have to scale a crazy cliff to make our way…

Sorry, that was a tangent….
We found the last lake..

One of the truly ironic things about the project is the amount of work and time that it takes to get to these places… Most often I have to get there….take a dip,…and head directly back out again.

This place would have been a nice place to hang for a bit.

Oh, well…Maybe some day. Right now I just want to make sure that we get out of this hanging basin and back on trail before dark.

It is getting late and we have a big, ridiculous ridge to climb up and six more “on trail” miles to bust out.

So, out we head.

It is situations like this that I am very happy that I use trekking poles. Somewhere through the evolutionary process of most animals,. they found out that “four legs good, two legs bad” is a valuable thing to keep in mind.

Well, atop the ridge we took a few awesome pictures and dropped back into the valley on trail and headed back to the car. We got out about 30 minutes after dark. Never great, but it is so much better when it’s dark and your on trail. Dark when your off trail is "No Bueno"!!!

So,..thats that. Upper Rowe Lakes and the three Linham Lakes.

Check!

All went well. Keith and I got our annual hike in. I got to 126 lakes and busted out a great day with the help of a good friend and some crazy goats.

Hope your crazy goats are well!!!

To Life,

Marc

Carcajou and Wahseeja Lakes

Good Evening,

Ever since I have started this project there have been lakes or groupings of lakes that people are always intrigued by.

When I tell them about what I’m doing, they get wild eyed and come up with the most remote, ridiculously hard, off trail lakes in the park and ask “Have you done this or that”?

One of the most commented on is a group of lakes near the Canadian border called the Northern Boundary Lakes. There are five of them and the last two fell on Tuesday.

So, I raise my glass to those five, because they have put up a heck of a fight.

On Tuesday, my friends Pat and Brian and I went to Carcajou Lake and Wahseeja Lake.

But, before that we had large plates of Cincinnati Chili.

For anyone who knows about this delicacy, you understand how happy I was to have a communal chili feed in the middle of nowwhere.

The next morning with a chili bomb in our stomachs we headed north to the northern boundary trail which is about four miles north of Goat Haunt. We said hello to the obelisk that marks the border and we headed west three and a half miles till we saw an entrance to a heavily wooded side valley that no one I have ever met has gone up. I’m sure its happened, but boy oh boy... would it be few and far between.

We had to cross Boundary Creek which luckily we had a few good logs to work across. Then into the guts we go.

It started off quite nice with some lovely meadow filled stretches.

That always ends and gives way to a thick tree filled mess.

This year has been one of the wettest on record. With rain come mushrooms. They were everywhere.

Huge ones.

Weird ones.

Also, that means that it was just wet. It had not rained in days, but the whole area was just moist.

Great moss.
After many hours working up a steep wooded valley we eventually dropped down to the creek that drains Carcajou Lake. Shortly after crossing it, we finally came to the first of our objectives.

Carcajou Lake.

We frolicked in the lake for a good while to get rid of the pine needles, grit and grime.

It was quite pleasant.

We took a nice little while here; even long enough for Pat to take a cat nap on the lake shore.

But, we had to keep going. There is no stopping and we had a long way to go. We were essentially going from one main valley to the next, but over, under and through the middle of nowhere.

We headed back out with the need to climb over a ridge to the lake on the other side.

It was thick and steep.

And hot! I had to wring out my bandana....Wanna see?

Along the way Brian made a friend.

We eventually just grabbed hand fulls of vegetation and pulled ourselves up a thousand feet of steep mess.

Luckily when we got towards the top, the blessed animals of Glacier National Park started to hook us up a bit. There was a perfect game trail over the top of the ridge that went on for a good while in the exact direction that we were headed.

It was amazing on the other side.

Lots of flower choked meadows.

If nothing else, just easier going since it was much more open. With that came huge views of the surrounding mountains.

In a past endeavor with a friend Matt I looked down on Wahseeja Lake.

I have been waiting for a long time to get back to it.

(I would also like to note that Matt just informed me today his wife Allison is pregnant!! Lets all raise a glass to their lovely, healthy, very tiny baby to be!!! )

Anyway it was very rewarding to get to this absolutely amazing lake. This was easily one of the most lovely that I have been to in all my time in the park.
We enjoyed it to the fullest. Seldom is there a perfect, large rock to jump off of. Well there is in Wahseeja Lake.

As to not carry around a bunch of wet clothes we all went naked.

So, fortunatly you get to just see a picture of me in the lake instead…No jumping pics.

But, like everything else in life, this too had to end.

There was a saddle about 300 feet above the lake that we had to get to and over.

On the other side was our destiny.

A 2000 foot steep grade going straight down towards Lake Francis and Lake Janet.

There was still many miles to go, onward and upward.

Only time for one last group picture of the lake.

Man that thing is nice.

The saddle proved to be big and wide.

It also had huge views of Mount Cleveland which is the highest peak in the park.

This hike just kept getting better.

But, down we went into the abyss. Not too bad, in relative terms. I guess the schwack up the Carcajou side of the trip was so nasty that this seemed quite tame.

2000 feet of extremely steep tame, but tame none the less.

Happily we gained the valley floor and headed our five more miles of trail back towards Goat Haunt.

A lovely sunset on the peaks above escorted us back to where we started.

I would like to extend a huge thank you to Pat and Brian. This was a very large endeavor and probably two of the ten hardest lakes that I have left in the park.

Without them I would not have just checked off lakes number 120 and 121.

All the best to everyone reading and to all a good night.

Ho Ho Ho

To Life,

Marc