After spending a day in Golden, BC doing laundry and recuperating (drinking Big Rock Beer), Angela and I headed up into Yoho National Park to catch the shuttle to Lake O'Hara. We were hoping to climb Grassi Ridge (5.7) on Wiwaxy Peak, but having made reservations three months in advance for the shuttle and camping left our schedule a bit inflexible, so we were gonna have to get lucky with the weather. When we stopped in Field at the visitor's center to buy our park pass, Angela checked the weather forecast on the bulletin board. The outlook didn't sound that great--there was a pretty good chance of storms and showers while we were going to be at Lake O'Hara.
We arrived at the O'Hara parking lot to find it plum full of cars! Finally found a spot to squeeze in our Explorer and commenced packing for our night at Lake O'Hara. Since the weather forecast sounded so pessimistic we decided to not bother with packing our rock gear and planned on just doing some day hiking instead. I was a bit bummed to leave the gear behind, but it didn't make sense to lug it along if we weren't going to use it. We finally figured out where the shuttle was going to load up and with a few minutes to spare we hauled our packs over to it.
At this point chaos ensued. We noticed another weather report on the kiosk by the shuttle pick-up. This report called for beautiful weather, contradicting the one we had read earlier! What the hell?! Best we could figure, the report back at the Field Visitor Center hadn't been updated yet (they were just opening when we arrived) and we had neglected to verify which days the forecast was actually for! Well, this changed everything. After some quick debate, we grabbed our packs and ran back the length of the parking lot to get our climbing gear. As quickly as we could (the shuttle was about to leave and we didn't want them giving away our reserved seats) we grabbed gear out of our car and crammed it into our backpacks. Nothing was neatly packed--we just stuffed it as best we could. Now that our packs were severely top-heavy we threw them on and dashed back to the shuttle hoping we hadn't forgot anything important.
The ride in the shuttle was pretty boring. The shuttle bus itself is just a converted school bus and it kinda felt like we were a bunch of grownups going on a field trip. The road is gravel and quite steep at times so the going is slow and it takes almost an hour to make the 7 miles. About halfway there it hit me: I forgot to pack the topos I had printed out for Grassi Ridge!!!! So, now we had all the gear we needed for the climb but no information at all. I couldn't believe it. I was really bummed now and mad at myself for forgetting something so important. I could recollect a little bit from the topos from memory, but it had been a long time since I had read them so what I could remember probably wasn't that useful.
With no choice to turn back and get what we had forgotten, we figured we'd just try to make the best of the situation. Perhaps we could find a guidebook or someone who could point us in the right direction up at the lake. If all else failed, the fact that we were going to be spending a day and a half at one of Canada's most beautiful destinations was at least somewhat of a consolation.
We finally made it to the campground and unloaded from the bus. The campground was quite a bit different than any we had been to before. For a variety of reasons (bears for one, uneducated campers for another) things are very structured at the camp. There is a large communal area for cooking and eating, a food storage and garbage building, and very tidy tent platforms crammed together along a loop trail in the woods. Since all the tent sites seemed about the same to us, we quickly claimed one and started setting up camp. Once that task was completed we dug out our map (at least we had remembered that!) and took a look at the trail system. We decided to check out Opabin Lake which is nestled in a hanging valley above Lake O'Hara.
