A Note About the Hiatus
Unfortunately for me and the devoted followers of this website, getting my pesky toe surgically reworked meant there were no fun trips to share. As a brief recap of the past seven months, I had foot surgery, recovered from foot surgery, bought a condo, and moved to Squamish.
You will be pleased to note the author (pictured above, thrilled to be near a waterfall) has made a full recovery and is back to frolicking. On to the trip report.
Mount Temple Scramble
Summary
- Distance: 16km
- Difficulty: very uphill but not technical
- Elevation gain: 1700m
Perhaps the most challenging part of this hike is getting the bus permit to Morraine Lake. Gabriel and I were on a delightful cross-BC roadtrip and staked out a coffeeshop in Banff so we would have cell network for this all-important transaction at 8am mountain time. Luckily, thanks to years of relentless speed training, I was able to click the button fast enough to get two bus passes to Morraine for our scramble objective: Mount Temple.
We brought helmets (needed) and ice axes (not needed). Other than that, it was just backpacks with snacks. It felt very weird to set out without a whole compliment of ropes, lockers, crampons, etc, but also quite nice to just bring a day pack. As a note, Gabriel was saddled with carrying the sandwiches made with possibly the driest sourdough bread ever baked by human hands, which was a low note for this expedition.
We set out in the inauspiciously smoky air at 9am two days later, distinguishing ourselves from the average tourists by the rapid click-clack of our hiking poles and the bounce of our helmets, indicating we were conducting some serious business. The hike to Sentinel Pass is beautiful, even in the smoke, and one can admire the next valley over and the noodly rock formations after attaining the ridge.
After the ridge, you turn looker's right and begin picking your way up through a scree slope with your helmet on. If you hike with Gabriel, you will get to learn about the rocks that contain 160 million year old worm fossils. It's mostly an arduous plod, though there are a couple sections of light scrambling. The only difficult part had a lovely rope to protect it, and I thought the trail was very beautifully marked and easy to follow, though I always like have a GPX track to reference against. I kept expecting the heinous scrambling to start and each time I was disappointed; mostly it's non-exposed switchbacks up the scree all the way to the top.
I will let my artist's rendition of the summit speak for itself; the views afforded by a 3500m peak are truly stunning.
One of the groups we met had expressed well-meaning concern about us catching the last shuttle back due to our rather unserious start time of 9am, so naturally I wanted to beat them back, and I'm happy to report we managed to do so. It took us six hours in total. Not so bad for an asthmatic with a toe injury and a man obsessed with looking for fossilized worms!
