Lake O'Hara Backpack & RVing at Yoho National Park, Canada

Where are we? On the Chilkoot Pass, upper portion of the Continental Divide, or at one kilometer on the fire access road to Lake O'Hara. Ten kilometers, actually ten kilometers to go to the lake. Nine more to go now. Nine to the campsite. So we're just at a truck stop, truck rest stop just outside of Golden. Beautiful view ahead of us and off towards Yoho Park which is where we're headed. Off we go to Lake O'Hara. It's a ten kilometer slog up the road and our loads are very heavy. We haven't already mentioned there's usually a shuttle bus that goes up this road during the summer but because of COVID-19 they're not running it and you can kind of get an idea of the view and it's going to be fantastic when we get up there. As you know we do a lot of hiking but we haven't backpacked and we're falling into the same trap as most people. We're carrying way too much stuff. We're worried we're going to be hungry. We're worried we're going to be cold and likely we'll be neither of the two. But we've got more gear and we haven't worn backpacks like this for several years so it'll be a break-in trip for us. I'm going to be taking a lot of breaks, especially with my back. Yeah, Mickey's back, as you know, has been acting up but it seems okay to give up the pace. You can see the clouds starting to thicken behind us and we can hear thunder just before I turned on the camera. So I'm going to try and pick up the pace a little. Unfortunately it's uphill but we're close. We're at about maybe the 8k mark almost. Soon, around the corner, hopefully. One more kilometer to the campground. The last 2k have been largely uphill. Has it been fun, Mickey? It's hurting. She's doing pretty good considering about three days ago she could barely walk because of her back. We're left at the 10k mark. You can see some of the shelters and tents all ahead. This is a communal area for eating. The shelters are closed of course because of COVID. Food cache over there. It's nice. Stairs, good. That's what we're looking for after the 10k in for the next couple of nights. Be a little bit of tweaking left to do but otherwise, sleeping bags are in. We're all ready. This is our home for a couple of days and we managed to avoid the thunder and a little bit of lightning that passed us by. So you can see very quiet remote spots. Very nice. That's our nearest neighbor but nobody there. So we just walked over to beautiful Lake O'Hara and some cabins. A little bit more developed than what I expected but it's just beautiful and peaceful. It's a short walk from the campground along a brook, babbling brook. It's just amazing. The lodge is actually closed because of COVID so there's no one there. Yeah, so we actually are lucky to be here when it's quiet. Quiet. Mashed potato flakes, dried vegetables, and textured vegetable protein. Ooh, that's amazing and it's bouncing everywhere. So it boiled and now we'll let it sit for 10 minutes. Maybe a little bit longer because we're at elevation. Yeah, mashed potato concoction. Mashed potato concoction. Mmm, that sounds appealing. I hope it tastes good. It sounds like something slim potato head would make. Yeah, it's like gruel. Hopefully it's better than gruel. Bee vans are small but lots of room for two people. Two-person tent, much smaller. Just starting to rain and some thunder here. We were lucky because we actually had dinner early and now there's a bunch of people cooking because it's closed. They're obviously getting rained on so I feel really badly for them. We got into our tent just before it started to rain so we were lucky we didn't get wet. Time to change out of the warm clothes into something a little cooler. Cross over the creek at the top of that little ridge and then work our way up that big chunky rock slope to get up there. It's like paradise. Look at the waterfall and the pond. Down there even just the green You can see where we came up this morning. Beautiful flowers. Coffee to go. Yeah, we're heading down the trail now. It's early in the morning but look at our view. So hope you enjoyed the most spectacular scenery of the Lake O'Hara region with us. It was just unreal. So amazing. Yeah, it's just spectacular. Yoho Park or anywhere I think here is just amazing. A couple things that we also wanted to just share. Yesterday while we were on our beautiful hike around the ledges and the upper ridges and the mountains we ran into Claire Hughes who's a Canadian Olympian so it was wonderful to chat with her and I would point out that she was doing, she'd hiked the 11 kilometers up to the lake then she was doing a trip that's probably about 20 kilometers and then she was hiking another 11 kilometers out and she seemed to think that was just an average day. So anyway made us feel like us mere mortals. Yeah, don't feel like an Olympian anymore. And the other thing we had a we had a tent failure while we were there. Unfortunately not catastrophic. The tent we took is an MSR tent and MSR products in my experience are wonderful but it was about 10 years old and the seam taping so along the seams on the fly they taped them and it came off and it was during a thunderstorm and heavy rain and I was thinking what is that funny looking tape? It was a seam seal tape so we had just a couple little drips but we MacGyvered a solution we had some sliced some garbage bags which you should always carry with you when you're backpacking and then we went to the park ranger and got some duct tape and some Gorilla Tape and basically seam sealed it with that and then again it stopped raining after that so that was kind of fun. And the third thing we just wanted to mention we often get this question when we're out hiking people want to know if we're taking bear spray and typically when we're at home the answer is no. We on the west coast we typically will hike with a small air horn and then just make noise and we've never had any problem in the decades of hiking there. We're always very respectful of any territory bears may be in but as soon as we're anywhere where there's grizzlies yes then we've still got the air horn but we're each carrying bear spray this time. There they are right there. Yeah two of the three. So as Mickey said this has just been a great trip and you know we look forward to coming back again at some point. Yeah I think the special part of this trip was that because of COVID only the people that are camping in the campground who had reservations to begin with are there. There are actually other day hikers that are coming up but it's a long slog up. Yeah I mean we've seen quite a few anyway. Certainly doable but you've got it's 11 kilometers to the lake and then if you want to do any of the other trips around and you're not an Olympian it'll be you know a long day. The park ranger was telling us that on the average in the summer they get like 300 people a day on the trails whereas when we were hiking we hardly saw anyone. No we saw like a like four or five people the whole day. Yeah so that was pretty amazing and special for us so we're very very grateful for that. And a special shout out to actually the park's people here at Yoho too because they're very helpful from the first night when we spent in the campground the guy was at the gate was really nice put us in a nicer spot than we had selected and the park rangers here have been very pleasant and very helpful. They were you know they got it they looked for gorilla tape and duct tape for us and yeah no we really appreciate their help in keeping the campground was immaculate very well maintained yeah just a great trip. So we hope you enjoyed this video and if you did please be sure to give us a thumbs up and make sure to subscribe if you haven't done so already and we shall see you next time and now we're heading five kilometers down the road back to the van. Till next time. Now we just have to see if the beer is still cold. I know I'm worried about the fridge and the battery. And the beer is still cold. Yay!