Wildlife
It
was the night before we started the actual hike and we were staying in
one of the backcountry campgrounds in Waterton Lakes National Park. I
woke up in the middle of the night in darkness and heard weird noise
outside. I woke Julien up to listen to it as well. It was a sharp,
whining moan, nothing we had ever heard before. We just lay still, tried
not to make any sounds of our own, or even breathe. The sound seemed to
circle around the tent for a while and then go further and further
away, until we only heard the waves crashing to the shore of the lake.
The next day in the visitor center we talked about our night and wardens
confirmed that lately a cougar has been seen near the campground.
Luckily it hadn’t caused any trouble to people but was just wandering in
the area. What a great reminder to whom the land actually belongs to!
And from that on, we kept our ears open.
-Piia
It was the first
morning of our hiking trip. I woke up feeling the tent being pulled by
someone or something. I thought Piia was kicking the fabric but she
seemed to be sleeping. What the heck was going on?
I
knew we were alone in the campground so the only choice was wildlife. I
sat up, just in time to see a claw scratching the tent. At that moment
we were both wide awake, started making noise and clapping our hands, to
scare the obviously curious bear away. We were pleased to hear it
started running and then it was quiet again. It seemed the wildlife was
no joke around here. Better keep that in mind.
-Julien
It was still
morning time, we were taking a break and sitting on small rocks next to
the trail that headed uphill and crossed with a small creek that we used
to fill our water bottles. Julien was sitting backwards to the trail
and taking care of his feet while I was just enjoying my cereal bar.
Then I glanced up to the trail and from around the curve there was a
wolverine jogging towards us. I just stared at it, stunned to see this
fairly rare animal in the middle of the day. I couldn’t even say
anything at first, until it was literally two meters from Julien. I
guess I must have said "Hey!" or something because suddenly the wolverine
stopped, glanced at me, turned as quickly as you can imagine surprised
animal doing it and ran away. Julien turned fast enough to see
wolverine’s bottom disappearing behind the curve and we just stood
there, quietly stunned of what the heck just happened.
-Piia
One of the millions of tracks we saw
Snow
We
climbed the Barnaby ridge in the fourth morning and planned to follow
it until its end, thinking it would offer good views over the Rocky
summits. We got that right, up there it felt like being at the top of
the world. It was sunny and not too windy, perfect weather. However,
soon it was obvious that hiking on a ridge, especially this one, wasn’t
going to be easy.
Packed snow covered the ridge in many places and even
though it usually carried us, sometimes we would go through and be
covered by snow until our waist.
And of course, when there’s snow,
there’s no trail, so we were basically following the ridge blind, never
knowing if the trail went down, until we came to a wall that you
couldn’t go down or up safely. We were wet from snow and sweat. People
had told us if we started the GDT in June, we would be hiking a lot on
snow. And so we did.
-Julien
Storm
It was after the
first week of hiking and the day had been a bit foggy and rainy. We had
just passed Coleman, were disappointed to leave it without having any
treats and were walking on a gravel road. We saw dark, intimidating
clouds getting near and we sped up thinking maybe we could get lucky and
avoid the rain. Little by little the sound of a roaring thunder got
near and then it started raining. Soon the thunder was straight over us;
the noise broke our ears and shook the ground. The clouds were pouring
water on us and soon the gravel road was just muddy surface that soaked
our feet. We found a spot for our tent, hurried to set it up and dove
in, being sure that the storm would be over soon and the next day would
be sunny and bright.
Two
hours later rain hadn’t stopped. Not even a little. We were dozing and
just waiting for the weather to clear. At some point during the night we
started to really wonder when it was going to end and the later it got
the more we were questioning if the sky was ever going to clear up. We
heard the creek nearby getting stronger and stronger and eventually
water came inside our tent as well. Little sleep and unpredictable
conditions messed with our minds and in the early morning, since the
rain still continued heavily, we started to wonder about how to continue
the trip with the weather so miserable.
We stayed in the tent until 2 pm the next day and the rain just kept
going. Since we knew eventually we should continue too we packed our
gear and started hiking, despite the conditions. Not knowing whether
this was just normal summer storm or something else we kept hiking and
forget the idea of giving up. We shouldn’t be facing anything too bad to
handle, right?
-Piia
During
following days we faced something to handle for sure. Water levels in
rivers were extremely high. Bridges, roads and big parts of forests were
washed away. The trail was often turned into creeks. All of this
obviously compromised our hiking and we faced dangerous river crossings,
hiked with wet feet without seeing a dry day basically until reaching
Banff, and with all that water it was hard to follow trails. Along the
way it became clear that the storm had been something else than ordinary
summer rain.
When
we arrived to Mt. Assiniboine Lodge and met the first people in over a
week, we heard it had been a storm of a century. Many places in southern
Alberta were under water and were facing enormous damage caused by
flooding. People at the lodge were amazed that we had made it through
the storm area, since no one was supposed to be in the backcountry. In
fact RCMP was empting the area with helicopters. By luck, we were
thinking, they hadn’t seen us. After all, it was another exciting story
to tell.
-Julien
Hiking without GPS or guides
One of the biggest challenges that we were willing to take on this trip was hiking without a GPS or the guide book that is written for the GDT. We don’t like carrying a GPS in general and we were confident that my experience in hiking in mountains and our education background in geography would take us through GDT only with bad quality printed maps and a compass. We were right, we made it through. But it wasn’t easy for sure.
A few days after the storm, while we were struggling with river crossings and trails turned into creeks, we were walking on a wide trail and knew there was supposed to be a crossroad somewhere. We found a lot of different small routes, leading to nowhere. Sometimes it was just animal tracks and sometimes it was a nice trail with red markings which wasn’t going to the good direction. According to our map we were supposed to head north but we couldn’t find any trails. So we went through a really hard bushwhacking, side walked a steep hill that was covered by wet snow and dense vegetation. We walked 10 exhausting kilometers, trying to find animal tracks to help us out. When we arrived at the other side of the hill (4 hours, a few liters of sweat and million swear words later) we found a beautiful trail marked with red tape. We figured a few hours later that this was actually the official GDT trail. Our map was just not updated; the new trail was running at the other side of the hill we just walked.
This kind of frustrating things happened a lot during this trip. But we made it and we had lots of fun trying to find our way with the maps we had.
-Julien
