Oh, Hara!

A late autumn visit to Lake O’Hara in Yoho National Park happened to fall on the last day the bus was running. This is a place that is difficult to get to, for good reason. It may be the most spectacular place in the Canadian Rockies, a series of glacial-fed lakes and towering peaks, threaded with narrow hiking trails that range in and around the valleys.

View of Lake O’Hara in Yoho National Park. Photo: Amy Krause.

Travel is limited here. You have to have luck and quick instincts to get one of the coveted seats on the school bus, two trips a day for a summer hiking season that stretches into October. If you’re quick, and head off into one of the valleys as soon as you get off the bus, you can have one of these vistas all to yourself for a time.

On the trail to the Opabin Plateau, above Lake O’Hara. Photo (detail): Amy Krause.

These mountains with their strange and magical names: Wiwaxy, Lefroy, Yukness, just over the pass from Lake Louise and its hordes of tourists.

On this trip, we didn’t venture to Lake McArthur, with its eerie surface of opaque turquoise, or up to the hanging valley of Lake Oesa, a shimmering jewel that drops into a series of falls and rock pools, all the way down to Lake O’Hara itself. We headed up, the steep climb to the Opabin Plateau and Opabin Lake, getting to the head of the cirque just as the worst of the snow hit, a near white-out.

The Lake O’Hara Lodge, from across the water. Photo: Amy Krause.

What had been a shallow dusting of snowflakes at the lakeshore became a driving wall of stinging crystals at higher elevations, blowing quickly into angular drifts that obscured the trail and made travel treacherous. We hiked with cleats strapped to our boots, and dug our poles in, sinking into a foot of snow to spread out our picnic lunch.