All along the Rockwall
A few weeks ago some friends and I hiked a section of the Rockwall Trail in Kootenay National Park, west of Banff NP. It was the first time in a long time I had been up in the alpine, above the tree line.
Parks Canada’s Helmet Creek patrol cabin, with Helmet Falls in the background, Kootenay National Park.
I was travelling with friends who are Parks Canada staff, so we were able to stay in two of the patrol cabins in the backcountry. This is an extraordinary privilege, not just because the cabins have wood stoves, propane, bunks with mattresses and pillows. But because these cabins are full of decades-old history, reaching back to when park wardens would pack in a season’s worth of supplies on horseback and set up camp in the cabins. Their settings, in among the beauty of Banff, Jasper, and surrounding mountain parks, is no accident.
The imposing peak of Mount Gray, at the south end of Rockwall Pass. We hiked over patches of snow, though it was mid-July.
Over three days, we had two full days of almost constant rain, a cold drizzle that came in under a blank, gray-white sky. This left the trails awash in sticky mud and the creeks running high. In the trees, it was admittedly miserable, blanking out views of the mountaintops and saturating the willow and pine saplings that lined the trails. But above the tree line, along the heights of Rockwall Pass, it was desolate and gorgeous.
The approach to Wolverine Patrol Cabin, surrounded by the burrows of Columbian ground squirrels.
In the open meadows around our second night’s accommodation, I expected to see bears. It was perfect grizzly habitat, lush with vegetation and pocked with a network of burrows for ground squirrels, packrats, wood rats, voles. A clear, shallow stream wound through the valley. But we had no sightings, other than the small mammals that busied themselves outside the cabin, and started chewing on its foundations as soon as the sun set.
Wolverine cabin, with Mount Gray in the background, on the third day when the sun came out.
We cut our hike short by one day, daunted by a looming section of the trail that would have been more than 20 km long, over two mountain passes that totalled over a kilometer in elevation gain to the next cabin at Floe Lake. Instead, we looped back to the trailhead through the Tumbling Creek backcountry campground, which was full of tents and backpackers, people packing up, ready to hit the trail for the day.
The Seussian stalks of alpine anemones, clustered in the meadow outside Wolverine cabin.
Sometime over the past few years, when I wasn’t looking, the sport of endurance trail running has somehow become more popular. We easily saw more than 30 runners on this trail, circling the loop in a day what took us three, galloping up hundreds of meters of elevation, over the pass, and down again with nothing but a couple of bottles of water and a canister of bear spray. I used to know trail runners who experienced Banff this way, but they were almost unique, few and far between. Now it’s the new thing, or maybe not so new. I haven’t been up there in a while.
Looking south on the trail, where we cut east and looped back to the trailhead.
Coming down from the pass, closing on about 16 kilometers of trail, we passed through avalanche debris that stacked above our heads, cut through with chain saws in the last few years to clear the trail. As we descended along the valley, wildflowers were everywhere – paintbrush, columbine, sunshine-yellow asters. The course of Tumbling Creek was pale blue with glacial runoff. We discussed picking up where we left off and finishing the trail next summer, but it was good to be back at the trailhead.
A new bridge on Tumbling Creek. The water is full of glacial silt, giving it its milky blue color.