The easy way to Lake O’Hara is to book the bus and ride up to the parking area.   But there are other ways to get there….

Wenkchemna Pass to Opabin Pass

Late in October we drove to Moraine Lake.    The first snows had not yet struck, but the road in was dry (its not plowed in winter).    No one was around.    We parked our 2WD vehicles at the parking lot and hefted our backpacks.   We hiked up the Sentinel Pass Trail to Larch Valley, then took the Wenchemna Pass trail.   This part of the hike was straight forward enough.   The hike passes Eiffel Peak, then Eiffel lLake before switchbacking up to the rocky pass.   We reached the top of the pass at the head of the Valley of Ten Peaks after hiking 9.7 km.  The pass offers views of most of the Wenkchemna Peaks and the Tokumm Creek Valley below.    It is a cold, windy, and barren spot.

We scrambled down the pass into the Tokumm Valley in B.C.  This is a remote steep-sided valley which is rarely visited.   At the bottom of the valley are some tall standing rock spires called the Eagles Eyre.   We did some free-climbing on these before proceeding on.  The valley is barren at this altitude but the trail/route was easy to follow as we climbed toward Opabin Pass.

Opabin Pass is just a scramble over trail, rock, and sometimes snow-ice.   We were able to skirt most of the ice on the right side.

Once over the top, hikers can glissade down the glacier on the other side:

Care must be taken.   Proper equipment and experience is needed before crossing any glacier.   With all crevasses uncovered, we were able to pick a safe route down the snout to the Opabin Plateau.   Once on the Lake O’Hara Trail system, we followed the well-defined West Opabin Trail down to the Alpine Club of Canada Elizabeth Parker Hut.

When we went to bed that night, we heard nothing and slept well.   When we woke up, we found 6″ of fresh snow!  We had to get back to our vehicles, so we chose to come down the Lake O’Hara Road (11km) to the unplowed Highway 1B.   It was a further 15 km of slogging through the snow to the Lake Louise junction and then the Moraine Lake Road all the way to our vehicles.    There were five us, so we loaded 3 hikers into the back of a small truck as ballast over the rear wheels and then we fishtailed, slipped and slid our way out of the valley.    We eventually reached the highway with our two vehicles late at night, with a 5 hour drive to return home.