My fellow Mountain Guides, Steve Blagbrough and Greg Yavorsky, and I
guided an ice-walk from Bow Hut to Peyto Hut and out Peyto Lake,
August 27-29. Conditions and weather were stellar, as reported
elsewhere. Of note is that the bridge over the creek that drains the
Peyto Glacier is still washed out with no word of being replaced.
This creates new challenges for exiting this valley. We constructed a
log bridge to cross the creek that drains Caldron Lake (this creek is
visible on as a looker's left hand branch in the photo below). The
valley bottom creek (the main one) was forded by finding a place
where the creek was divided into 2 channels (before the treed hill/
constriction in the the picture below). We left our boots on and
crossed in "centipede" chains of 5 with a Mountain Guide breaking the
flow at the head. Had we known we would be leaving our boots on we
would have crossed the upper -Caldron Lake- creek with them on too.
Also of note, and visible in the second photo below, is that the lake
at the end of the Peyto Glacier has increased in size and grown a
long finger lake up the inside of it's west lateral moraine. That
moraine has be considerably undermined by water and has several large
collapses that we chose to cross above, up glacier.
Happy trails,
Barry Blanchard
Mountain Guide
www.barryblanchard.ca
www.yamnuska.com
The Caldron Lake creek on the left and Peyto Glacier creek on the
valley bottom
Peyto Glacier with it's pro-glacial lake, and new finger lake, just
visible.
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Report as the sole factor in planning trips or making decisions in the field.
Please check out http://acmg.ca/mcr for more information.
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