Beautiful Lake Louise! It has been awhile since I’ve been outside my house and done much of anything due to the current state of things in this world. A little camping, hiking, and geocaching was just what I needed! Went camping with my buddies. We stayed at the Lake Louise campground, so it was a quick drive to the lake and it was BUSY! So many people, I’m glad we went early since there was still some parking in the overflow lot when we arrived. When we left around noon, it was full!
I’ve previously seen lots of photos posted online by friends and strangers who have visited Lake Louise and some of the surrounding lakes and with the colour of the water, I always wondered if the images had been photo edited. The teal colour just doesn’t seem real! But it is, I have now seen it for myself! The sky could have cooperated more, but it was the water that was truly amazing to see.
So we hiked around one side of the lake, couldn’t do it without attempting to get some geocaches of course! Managed to get two virtual and one physical cache, yay smilies on my map! There were two earth caches that we hiked by. Stopped at the first one but the questions that required answers in order to submit the cache were HARD!! Like actual science and math involved with some crazy calculations that if you got wrong, you’d have no hope of getting the correct answer. I actually do have most of the answers for the caches and may still submit them if I feel like figuring out the rest of the questions. My party and I really didn’t feel like taking the time to figure it out while we were there. We just wanted to hike!
These stairs are sort of near the physical geocache we found. One of my buddies who to my knowledge has not geocached before, found it immediately upon walking by its location. It was mostly hidden, not sure I would have noticed it that fast! Had to be careful with all the ‘muggles’ around, didn’t want to let them know that we were ‘up to something!’
This part of the trail is toward the other end of the lake, just before the virtual cache that we found there called ‘Tip of the Lake.’ The trail was mostly smooth and flat, a few small ‘hills’ but not too bad. Not paved so I’d for sure recommend a good walking or hiking shoe.
I was using my phone for caching but also am learning how to use my GPS device so used both to compare. I had loaded caches onto my Garmin and I was able to see them all on the device. I loved how I could just turn it on and within a minute or so, it automatically found my location. I figured out how to load the nearby caches. Like my phone, it showed the navigation in regard to how far away I was from the cache. This picture shows ‘Tip of the Lake’, one of the virtual caches we found. along with my location at the time, 80 metres away, I think! When we reached the cache, my location was right on top of it.
Spoiler alert! The ‘Tip of the Lake’ virtual cache. There was also a question that required submitting which I thought was a bit open to interpretation so hopefully it was the thought that counts!
The hiking trail only went along one side of the lake, but there were actually two trails: The regular trail and another that I called the ‘high road’. So to change it up, we took the high road back and determined that was a bit of a mistake as it became quite obvious a little way in that it is a horse trail. This picture below is only the start of the muckiness, it got worse and worse as we went, but we got to a point where we just didn’t want to turn back! I didn’t care too much since I was wearing my waterproof hiking boots, but others were not the best outfitted for it. Things got real muddy and mucky and it was deep and soft, had to stick to the edges of the path to avoid most of it. And the horse poop… it was everywhere! At one point on the way back, a riding group actually came through, so there must be somewhere to sign up for a horseback ride! I would have loved to be on a horse again!
I love this rainbow picture, my phone must have somehow caught a glare at the perfect angle and created it. There was definitely no actual rainbow over the lake! So this was technically a photo edit, even though I had nothing to do with it. That water though, I can’t get over the colour, this is absolutely natural with the sun shining on it!
This boathouse just maaaaaaay have been near a virtual cache. It was renting canoes and people were in them on the lake. If I come here again, I think I want to be in a canoe! Today would have been a good day for it.
You wouldn’t think it was July with all the clothes I’m wearing in this picture! But as usual I had too much and ended up shedding some layers as we hiked. The sun did come out eventually!
All in all this hike ‘There and Back Again’ from one tip of the lake to the other and back took us a couple of hours and was easily good for 10,000 steps and over 16,000 for the day. Even though 10,000 steps is typically 7K for me, I don’t think the actual hike was that distance but who knows, maybe it was! We got much more of a workout on the way back with the horse trail.
Stay tuned for Day 2 of hiking at Lake Louise!
