1/3/97 - Glacier Gorge Loop via Lake Haiyaha, Rocky Mountain National Park, ColoradoClass 1 & 2 Snowshoeing/Skiing, Elevation at Haiyaha, 10,220ft.Trekkers:
Gem Lake is a trail I hit many times each summer. I think the Glacier Gorge area is my "winter Gem Lake" — I’ve been up to Alberta Falls, the drainage, Mills Lake, and beyond many times already this winter, and the snowshoeing season is just getting going from what everyone tells me. Ernie and I were discussing a snowshoe trek to do and I asked if he’d every gone over to Haiyaha via the Glacier Gorge trail. He said he had, but only once, when he was 14 years old, and he hadn’t done it in the winter. My maps indicated that Bear Lake, via Haiyaha was about 2.5 miles. Since it’s about a mile up the Glacier Gorge drainage, and roughly .4 miles back down to the TH from Bear Lake, this looked like a pretty reasonable day hike/trek. What I found interesting is that every time I’ve been up at the junction of the trails (at the top of the drainage), I’ve never seen any tracks on the unmaintained trail over to Haiyaha. So, on Friday morning, Ernie and I left Estes Park and headed up Bear Lake road. It was about 40 degrees in Estes, and raining, and if we didn’t know that it was probably 10 degrees cooler above 9000 ft, it might seem silly to expect to do any snowshoeing a mere 25 minute drive from home! Even knowing this, Ernie and I both were somewhat concerned that the warm weather might make for less than ideal conditions. Sure enough, by the time we parked my car at the half-full Glacier Gorge TH parking lot, it was snowing lightly, but about 33 degrees. As we were crossing the road, a dog appeared suddenly right behind Ernie, and a guy from the parking lot ran out to retrieve it. We made our final preparations and just 100 ft up the trail, we put on our gear (snowshoes for me, xc skis for Ernie). Just a short way up the trail, we came to the junction to go up the drainage. We paused a moment to adjust equipment and stuff (Ernie put on skins on his skis), and we saw two guys headed up the trail, each with a dog on a leash! Ernie and I looked at one another, knowing that it was against Park rules to bring dogs on the trail. I asked Ernie if he usually said anything to violators of these or other rules. He said he did sometimes, and I mentioned that one time I "yelled" at a couple who were picking wildflowers (!). |
Other photos:
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| Anyway, these two guys came up to where
we were and asked whether the drainage trail led to the
Loch, and after we told them it did, Ernie politely asked
them if they knew they couldn’t take dogs on the
trail. When they questioned this, we both assured them
that would be ticketed if caught by Park rangers. They
went up the trail a few yards and conferred. We shrugged,
and headed up the trail, but as we passed them, one of
them took both dogs and was going to take them back to
their car. He was really grumbling though. We started up the drainage, a familiar trail, since this was the fourth time I’d been on it in almost as many weeks. The problem was the temperature -- although it was snowing, we both started overheating very quickly. We stopped to open our "pit vents" and continued. Soon, even that wasn’t enough, and though it was 32 degrees and snowing, we both shed our shells and continued on up with nothing but fleece/polyester shirts for tops. This helped a lot, and we continued in relative comfort until we got to the trail junction. We paused a moment for water, and headed past the sign that said, "Unmaintained Trail" and "No Horses" and immediately began blazing our own new trail through the snow. Conditions were very good. Now around 30 degrees and about 11:30am. Snow conditions were excellent for snowshoeing, with a somewhat fresh base of 2-3 inches, and probably 30-40" of base. Almost immediately, we had trouble figuring out exactly how to go, because the summer "trail" was totally obscured by all the snow. For the first few minutes, we saw older ski and snowshoe tracks, but nothing that helped us gauge which way to go. We knew we had to skirt around the north edge of one of the Glacier Knobs, but the terrain was tricky and it was difficult to pick a line that wouldn’t take us down farther than we wanted to go. We decided to stop and use map and compass to set the best course. We took a bearing and then headed out more confidently, but that didn’t make the terrain any less challenging or tricky. For awhile, we did lots of traverses across fairly steep slopes. This was pretty easy for Ernie on his skis, but I was having a lot of trouble going perpendicular to the slope. My shoes kept wanting to slide down the slope, and it puts a lot of stress on your bindings and ankles. I did have one of my shoes come off during this. When I stepped out of the shoe, I postholed in snow higher than my knee. After about 30 minutes of this, we started descending, and the going got easier. We were still heading in the rough direction of our bearing, but the totally overcast and low visibility conditions, plus having to weave in and out of the trees and around the rocks made it difficult to believe we were on course. At one point, we’d gotten so turned around that we couldn’t believe what our compass was telling us — we were almost 180 off! The compass was right, though, and we trusted it. We decided to take a break and eat something, as I was running low on energy. It was also getting colder, so we put our jackets back on. I had some excellent egg, bacon, cheese, and potatoes wrapped in a wheat bread shell, and a couple of oatmeal cookies. After washing down some food with water, we were on our way again. After a bit more relatively flat stuff, we started ascending a fairly open and exposed hill. The higher we got, the tougher the going was. Ernie was in really good shape, and would usually pull way out ahead and then have to wait for me. I kept telling him he was kicking my butt up the hill! Ernie had my compass and was making frequent checks, but I confess that I didn’t have a clue where we were, or where Haiyaha was. I think for awhile Ernie wasn’t quite sure either. Visibility was very poor with all the snow and it was very hard to see any features which we could identify on our topo maps. Even though we didn’t know exactly where we were, we knew it would be very easy to "get out" if we started running out of time. I trusted Ernie’s navigational sense, though, and it didn’t let us down. The terrain started getting very challenging again, and through gaps in the snow, I could see an open area in a valley which seemed like it should be Haiyaha (or, if we were really off course, maybe Dream or Nymph). After some really tough stuff, I just tried to keep Ernie in sight, and blazed my own trail, as his high line on the steep hill was difficult to stay on. I’d even fallen a couple of times, and sometimes the hill was so steep I just had to sit down and slide down to a more negotiable part of the hill. My fleece/Capilene gloves started feeling damp, so I stopped the next time I caught up with Ernie to put on heavier (and dry) gloves. It also felt good to catch my breath, as the strenuousness of the 10,000+ ft terrain was getting to me more than usual. A little farther ahead, we could clearly see that we’d found the southeast edge of the lake. Ernie kept on going so we would come down more toward the western end. We stopped and took a few pictures, noting the stark and icy blue beauty of the frozen lake’s surface. At about 1:30pm, we arrived at Lake Haiyaha, an Indian word for "Big Rocks", and most apropos. It was snowing pretty hard, and the temps were down to about 25 degrees. We walked out on the lake, marveling at the way the ice had broken and pitched up. It looked like something from the Arctic! I'd never seen any ice quite like this. There were some rocks that were sticking up 6-8" above the ice, and they had a cap of another 6-8" of ice on top of them. When I asked Ernie about this, he explained that the lake froze when the water was above the rocks, the the level of the lake went down as water under the ice continued to flow out the drainage. Interesting stuff! We took more pictures of the ice and us standing on or in it, then we sat down on a fallen log with our backs to the wind and snow and had a cup of coffee which I’d brought in a thermos. It was good, but in the past hour, I’d cursed all the extra weight I’d been carrying. It sure tasted good though, and I’d have to say it earned its keep. Soon we decided to leave, and headed east off the lake. We didn’t see the summer trail anywhere, so we continued blazing our own trail in the direction of Dream Lake. Not far from Haiyaha, Ernie noticed the fresh tracks of a snowshoe hare. Then he caught a glimpse of it slightly uphill from us. We followed the tracks up a bit, hoping to get another glimpse, as I hadn’t seen it. For 5 or 10 minutes, we followed the trail, but didn’t see him. Finally, I saw motion in some brush, and saw him bolt out across an open space only about 20 feet away from me! It brought a smile to my face, as he was a large and handsome fellow, larger than most jackrabbits I’ve seen, with large eyes and ears, a beautiful white winter coat, and an incredible "pace." We judged it to be almost 5 feet between the centers of his distinctive tracks. Ernie said that he’s seen a snowshoe hare only once before, and though it was common to see their tracks, it’s pretty rare to actually see the animal. We hope he’ll forgive us for any stress we caused him. We continued on, noting that following the hare had gotten us off track, but nothing serious. We came to a stream crossing, crossed over, then weaved through some trees again. Soon we saw one of the bridges on the summer trail — on one side it had snow drifted up more than 2 feet higher than the hand rail! We went a little downstream and crossed. I went back to the drift and stood atop it, looking down at the bridge, smiling at the thought of telling someone next summer that I stood on snow above the bridge! Farther down the trail, Ernie was getting concerned that we were going to miss Dream, so he started pulling us in a different direction, and though tougher, it was correct. We started seeing more tracks, and before long, we even heard some voices in the woods. Soon we found ourselves just below what we recognized to be the summer trail to Dream. As we merged with this trail, we met three women on the trail whom we spoke with briefly before heading up to the lake. We took slightly different paths to the lake, arriving at the same time. The weather here was pretty extreme, a little above 20 degrees, snowing very hard, and the 30+ mph wind was driving the snow almost horizontally across the lake. Despite this, Ernie and I walked directly into the wind toward the west end of the long, thin lake. After only a minute or two, we turned to look back and the other hikers had already gone. We went out a bit farther, then turned our backs to the blizzard and just stood there and looked at the desolate beauty of the lake. We talked a bit about how some people might think it crazy to stand on a frozen lake in a blizzard, but you have to actually do it to appreciate how beautiful it is. The fact is, we were properly equipped, and quite comfortable, even in fairly extreme conditions. I had that inexplicable lump in my throat I sometimes get when my senses are overloaded by nature’s beauty. Ernie asked if I wanted to go over a ridge to the north and see a tiny little pond (it’s not even on my map) he and some friends had named Kelsey’s Bar Lake because of a log they’d all sat on once. We went over the ridge, slid down to the lake, and sat on the log and had a second lunch break. Because of the low temps, the water we were carrying was getting pretty slushy, especially in the small water bottle I carry outside my pack. Coffee would have been tasty, but we drank it all at Haiyaha. Still, our snack recharged us, and after a short break, we got up to continue on, as it was cold enough to make sitting still for very long a bit chilly. Ernie took us on a route that led us down to the west end of Bear Lake, bypassing Nymph Lake. We descended very quickly, and Ernie even took a couple of spills. We stopped one last time to take in the beauty of the steep icicle-coated rocks overlooking Bear Lake, where we could make out people walking, snowshoeing, skiing, and sledding on it. The occasional whoop of joy found its way to our ears, and we knew that were truly coming out of the wilderness. I think we were both silently resisting going back to "reality." As we stood there being snowed on and taking in the splendid beauty, Ernie remarked that there must be people stuck in apartments in Manhattan who would never in their lives experience what we’d experienced that day. And how lucky we are that if we were only able to do this once a year, we live such a full life. We made our way uneventfully down to Bear Lake, and of course here we saw tracks everywhere. At the edge of the lake, Ernie stopped to remove the skins from his skis, and then we continued across the lake and stopped at the ranger station. I was going to use the emergency phone (just an Estes Park dialtone) to call home about running a couple of hours late, but they’ve replaced the standard phone with some kind of pushbutton call/intercom box and I couldn’t call. We got on the trail to go back down to Glacier Gorge, and that was almost the last I saw of Ernie — it’s only .4 miles and all downhill and he must have really flown! At about 4:30pm, we found ourselves back in the parking lot where my car was covered with almost 4" of snow. Somewhat sadly, we extracted ourselves from our gear, swept the snow off the car and headed back to reality. After stopping off at Ernie’s store for a few minutes, we went to our house for wine and cheese. It was a pleasant end to a pleasant day. |
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