Akamina Ridge will forever stand out in my mind as the single most grueling and spectacular hike of 2011.
The entire trail spans 18.4 kilometres; no small feat at the best of times.
But compounding the intensity of the hike was the fact that we had completed the 17.6 kilometres of Lineham Ridge and Rowe Lakes less than 18 hours earlier.
Other mitigating factors included severe exposure, deep snow, intense heat, and a knee injury.
Despite the trials and tribulations of Akamina Ridge, to date I have found no other trail as outstandingly worthwhile as this.
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| Welcome sign about 2 km into the adventure |
Getting an early start on Akamina was a top priority.
Not only did we want to get the most challenging parts of the trail behind us before the sun blazed high enough in the sky to scorch us to a crisp, but we had a long drive home ahead of us once the hike was complete.
Fortunately, getting an early start on any hike is actually quite straightforward when one is camping in the great outdoors.
The sun rises at an unspeakable hour.
Strict avoidance of bathroom breaks throughout the black and chilly night dictates that by 6 a.m. one’s bladder is full to bursting.
Sleeping in is simply not an option.
And so we rose with the sun, broke camp, loaded up the truck, and headed for the trail.
Remembering to compensate for the erroneous odometer rendered inaccurate by my mud tires, we easily located the trailhead 10 km from the Waterton townsite on the Akamina Parkway.
The first 1.5 km of the trail climbed generally west through the chilly shade of the forest before cresting at 1800 metres and then dropping 50 metres over the next 0.7 km to a very important junction.
At this junction, leisurely amblers generally continue west another 2.7 km to Wall Lake.
Eager to not be classed as leisurely amblers, we headed south at this junction towards Forum Lake.
We knew that we would be looping back around Wall Lake near the end of our journey.
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| Early morning dew drops |
Immediately after the junction, our trail began to climb more intensely, gaining 200 metres over two kilometres.
The scenery here was overpoweringly uninspiring, although there was a mildly pleasant detour to a mildly interesting waterfall.
The final 50 metres to the shore of Forum Lake passes over slippery boardwalks that traverse a boggy wetland dotted with few-flowered anenomes before rocketing out of the trees and into an avalanche zone.
An entire village of tamarack trees had been mowed down by a thunderous snowslide at some point in the previous months.
Each tree was listing at 45 degrees under the burden of megatons of heavy spring snow.
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| Icebergs adrift on Forum Lake |
Forum Lake is a beautiful cerulean tarn tucked into the bowl created by an outlier of Akamina Ridge (2,565 m).
Large photogenic icebergs of aging blue ice floated, unmoving and silent, on the languid surface of the lake.
I paused here for several minutes, capturing the other-worldly colours and textures around me on film.
From the northeast shore of Forum Lake, the trail heads generally west-northwest to a low point on the backbone of Akamina Ridge.
I use the term “low point” loosely, since negotiating 150 metres of gain through a thick forest, in which the trail was obliterated with deep snow, and then laterally across the icy slope of the avalanche was required to gain a foothold on said backbone.
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| Tamarack trees mowed down by a snowslide |
Losing sight of a trail is a common problem for Nicky and me.
The reason for this, however, has nothing whatsoever to do with a lack of skill or experience.
We often lose our trail because we insist on hiking unhikeable trails in inhospitable conditions.
We hiked Akamina Ridge on July 17, 2011.
One would expect that timing a hike for mid-July would ensure snow-free conditions, but one would be wrong.
The avalanche slope on Akamina Ridge is north-facing.
It is also situated at well over 2,000 metres above sea level.
It is also in Canada (although just barely).
These three factors together ensured that a fair chunk of our hike that day involved struggling through deep drifts of the white stuff.
In shorts.
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| Timidly crossing the avalanche zone |
As we rounded the north shore of Forum Lake, our trail deviously disappeared under a blanket of snow and into dense forest.
Our route-finding here became quite challenging.
A group of three hikers had passed us earlier, so at first we thought we’d simply be able to follow in their footsteps as they bushwhacked on snow and through the brush.
It wasn’t quite as simple as that, however.
Patches of deep snow were interspersed with stands of snowless thick trees and shrubs.
We would follow half a dozen fresh footprints in the snow, only to lose the path quickly as the snow gave way to a swath of trees and dense rooty undergrowth. We were able to see several possible distant patches of snow the hikers may have gone to from here, but determining the correct path of snow to ain for was a process of trial and error.
And keep in mind that the route we were forging through the trees on the heels of the other hikers was not the exact trail.
We knew this.
The other hikers knew this.
But we were all just charging through the trees as roughly accurately as possible in the hopes that once we were through, the route across the open avalanche zone would be apparent.
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| Looking down towards Wall Lake and up towards ridge |
It was.
But the joy of its obviousness was offset by the technical difficulty of crossing it.
The slide was only a few hundred yards across.
But it was steep, deeply snow-covered, and loose.
We were venturing into this territory without avalanche safety gear or training (do not do this!), and so we nervously wanted to cross the slide as quickly as possible.
It was in this state of frightened haste that I twisted my right knee.
I felt a mildly uncomfortable “pop” but thought no more of it.
At the far edge of the avalanche slope the hill became unbearably steep and required hands-and-knees scrambling in order to haul ourselves onto the backbone.
We had eagerly been anticipating this backbone, since its warm and dry countenance appeared to promise safety from the avalanche as well as reprieve from the discomfort of hiking in knee-deep snow in shorts with no gaiters.
The moment I finally heaved my weary body onto the long-awaited crest, I was immediately struck with a disquieting reality.
This was the narrowest ridge I’d ever been on.
Five hundred metres below, straight in front of me, was Wall Lake. And I mean straight below. I grabbed onto a bonsai tree for safety.
It would only have taken one false step forward to go careening over the precipice and straight to the bottom of the lake.
I looked behind me towards Nicky struggling up the last few difficult metres.
“How does it look?” she called.
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| Sticky Jacob's ladder eking a meagre living from bare rock |
“Ummmm, it’s kind of steep up here,” I replied, downplaying the severity of the situation knowing that she abhorred heights and quivered in the face of exposure, “but I think we’re finally on a path at least.”
Soften bad news with good.
There really wasn’t enough room up on this ridge to find a place to sit and pull out the GemTrek map to confirm our next step, but the trail appeared obvious, heading right and slightly down the ridge to the north. But after exploring this route for a dozen yards or so it became quite clear that we were mistaken.
The trail vanished completely.
Continuing in this direction would lead us straight over a cliff and down to Wall Lake at a faster rate of speed than would be compatible with the continuation of life.
Nicky was getting upset and visibly shaken by our predicament.
I parked her in a safe spot and gave her a shrub to cling to.
I consulted the map which seemed to insist that we needed to head south up this ridge, not north.
I glanced up in that direction and then back to the map.
There had to be some mistake.
To the south, the ridge was a menacing and insurmountable wall of boulders.
One false move to the right would land you in the drink far below.
One false move to the left would send you screaming down the avalanche field we’d just risked our lives to cross.
And turning back really wasn’t an option, since doubling back over that precarious snowslide would crush our spirits if not our bones.
There really was no choice but to go forward and negotiate our way over this massive wall of boulders.
I decided to scout ahead in an effort to determine whether this was a foolhardy suicide mission or a foolhardy adventure.
I shared my plan with Nicky.
“Umm, okay, so here’s the deal.
I’m pretty sure that 40-storey wall of boulders is our trail,” I stated, pointing in the direction of our foe.
I saw all the colour drain from Nicky’s face.
“Are you serious?
I can’t do that, Jody.
There is no way I’m going up that.”
“It will be okay.
Let me just run up ahead a ways and see if I can find the proper path.”
“Promise not to leave me up here!” Nicky called after me.
“Yeah, I’ll see you back at the truck, Nicky!” I replied sarcastically.
“What do you think I’m going to do, leave you up here?
Of course I won’t leave you up here!
Don’t be ridiculous.”
Now, for those readers who may now be thinking that Nicky is coming across as a bit feeble here, let me take a moment to correct you before I continue with this narrative.
When it comes to hiking with me, many have volunteered over the years.
I cannot count the times I have heard the request, “Jody, can I come hiking with you sometime?”
This request is always met with an eagerly affirmative response from me, since hiking with oneself does become tiresome.
Almost without fail, however, my new hiking partner either ends up asking me to carry their pack the rest of the way, or moans some kind of nonsense about exhaustion, or complains of blisters, and almost certainly refuses to ever come hiking with me again.
That is, they all did until Nicky came along.
Nicky has never refused a hike.
She rejoices in trail-earned injuries, she is interested when I point out the subtle yet fascinating differences between the fringed and northern varieties of Grass of Parnassus, she celebrates the adorableness of small furry mountain rodents, she taught me how to identify Chapurtia by its leaves, she bears with me uncomplainingly when my enthusiasm for photographing an insect delays our progress indefinitely, she always carries her own pack (which is notoriously heavier than mine) and she has never, ever, complained that a hike is too long, too exhausting, or too difficult.
And so Nicky's apprehension speaks volumes of how truly frightening the sight before us truly was.
I scampered ahead to calculate the odds that continuing on this path would result in one or both of us not coming home alive.
I pegged the odds at 50:50.
Not great, but I felt reasonably confident that if we went slowly, we’d succeed.
Surely the ridge beyond this impossible wall of boulders had to be worth it; otherwise Akamina Ridge wouldn’t have ended up in our most-trusted trail guide.
There are no words or even photographs that could possibly accurately convey what came next, but I will try.
In order to picture the Terrifying Wall of Death, imagine several hundred boulders, each about the size of an SUV, stacked on top of one another in a pile 200 metres high.
The stack of boulders is resting atop a 500 metre precipice.
The boulders are bare and have no trees or roots or other vegetation that could safely be used for handholds.
In order to climb from one boulder to the next, one must stretch one’s body to its full extent, so that if one stands on tiptoes, one can just barely reach a little crevice or notch in the next boulder with outstretched fingertips.
Compounding the fear factor, the boulders are stacked at such angles that slipping to one’s right or left is highly probable.
But because there are no guardrails, such a slip could certainly be the last mistake one ever makes.
Compounding my own personal stress was the clear fact that I was suddenly in charge of Nicky’s safety as well.
Nicky is a tough girl, but she is terrified of exposure and suffers from vertigo.
Being afraid of exposure is a reasonable fear arising from a rational sense of self-preservation.
I do not possess this sense.
And so it stood to reason that I would be the foreman of this project.
Here’s how we conquered the Terrifying Wall of Death.
I would toss my pack over the hump of the boulder in front of me.
I would then stretch my body to its full length (almost nine feet), find a handhold, and haul myself up each boulder.
I would then brace myself in a variety of skillful ways to safely reach back over the edge of the boulder for Nicky’s hand.
I then pulled her up to the ledge to meet me, where I parked her until I could get up and over the next boulder.
I made great efforts to not look down to the lake below.
I also worked hard to give the illusion that I was not at all afraid.
I realized early on that showing my fear would not affect our ability to conquer this obstacle in a positive way.
And so I stuffed my fear down into the bottom crevices of my backpack and ignored it.
I could always pull it out later if I needed it.
The climb up this wall was unbelievably emotionally draining for both of us.
But when we were finally over this wall of boulders and soaring freely on a broad and verdant ridge dotted with bright splashes of fuchsia moss campion (Silene acaulis) and lavender sticky Jacob’s ladder (Polemonium viscosum), we gave each other a huge hug and breathed a collective sigh of relief.
We knew the hike ahead would have its own set of challenges – we could see them already – but we had annihilated the Terrifying Wall of Death and we were euphoric.
Fortunately, it was here, and not on the T.W.D. that the bottom of my pack ripped apart.
I noticed it when I sat down to have a drink of water and review the GemTrek map.
All of my gear was protruding from a large rent in the fabric.
I cleverly removed all of my gear from my pack, wrapped it up inside an unused jacket and tied the arms together, then stuffed the whole package back into the pack.
With all of my equipment tucked safely inside the jacket, it wouldn’t matter for now if the pack had a six inch hole in the bottom.
Nicky promised to help me keep an eye on the rip and ensure that I didn’t lose anything.
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| Looking back where we had come from |
Once we had regrouped and felt ready to proceed, we started up the next part of the ridge.
There was plenty more climbing ahead of us.
Akamina Ridge, like many ridges, is shaped a bit like the Loch Ness Monster:
a long series of humps, with each one requiring an ascent to a summit and then a descent before ascending the next hump.
Akamina has a series of four humps, and we were on our way up the first.
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| On horizon: Kintla Lake, Glacier National Park, MT |
There were another 200 metres of elevation gain between the top of the T.W.D. and the summit of the first hump.
This elevation gain was split evenly between a narrow grassy backbone and a severely steep section of narrow rocky switchbacks.
The narrow rocky switchbacks were only slightly less sketchy than the wall of boulders we had just surmounted.
And when I say the switchbacks were narrow, please understand that I mean that here the trail was approximately six inches wide.
If one needed to pause for a mental health break, one was required to stop with one foot forward of the other, since there was not enough room to place them side by side.
A few inches in the wrong direction and one faced the probability of plummeting 800 metres to the valley below.
Which, by the way, was in the United States.
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| Steer clear of cornices! |
The summit of the first of four humps along the ridge is the highest point on the trail (2,565 m).
There are spectacular views south from this point into Glacier National Park, since Montana is a mere 1.2 km from the summit of Akamina.
To the southwest we could see the sparkling emerald waters of Upper Kintla Lake and massive skyscraping peaks such as Kinnerly Peak (3,031 m), Kintla Peak (3,079 m), and Mount Custer (2,708 m) stretching seemingly into the stratosphere.
The sky was a glorious shade of indigo, and there was very little UV protection between us and the summer sun.
We were heating up.
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| One of several humps of Akamina Ridge, mountain goat in foreground |
We sat at the summit and sent satellite messages home to reassure loved ones of our ongoing safety.
I gorged on peanuts and dark chocolate and took several photographs of Glacier National Park before we repacked our gear and carried on.
For the first time since the junction near the trailhead, we were descending briefly.
It felt wonderful!
As we crested the second hump we caught sight of a lone mountain goat grazing in a lush patch of vegetation in the dip between the second and third humps.
I started snapping photos of him from quite a distance away in case he became alarmed by our presence and fled.
I needn’t have worried; he stood his ground while we approached and passed him.
Nicky insisted that I give him his space.
I didn’t have my 500 mm Sigma wildlife lens with me, so of course I was keen to get up close and personal with this charming fellow.
The closer I got, however, the more irritated Nicky became with my intrusion into the goat’s personal space.
He didn’t seem particularly bothered, but I felt that venturing farther onto his turf would likely bring an unpleasant retaliation from my hiking partner.
I reluctantly steered clear.
Just beyond the goat, Nicky’s keen eye spotted a mother ptarmigan darting between the grass and the snowy cornice at the north edge of our ridge.
Upon closer observation, we counted one, two, three, four, five, six! little fluffy ptarmigan chicks peeping and scurrying about!
They didn’t seem the least bit troubled by our presence, and we watched them quietly for a while.
In fact, I got one photograph with all seven ptarmigans and the billy goat together in the same frame!
It was magical up there.
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| Red line traces the route ahead of us |
Descending from the fourth and final hump of the ridge, I was beginning to feel the effects of the relentless sun.
There is rarely any shade atop a ridge, and Akamina was no exception to this rule.
My left shoulder and left ear were getting the lion’s share of the sun, and they had turned a vibrant lobster pink.
No matter, I thought, within a few days the burn would give way to a glowing tan (albeit lopsided in favour of my left side).
As the ridge curved north and the grade eased before our final descent, we came across an enormous pile of grizzly scat.
Our cameras both immediately sprung into action to capture the drama.
Surely that bear had to be somewhere in the vicinity.
We had been unfairly denied a bruin encounter the day before on Lineham Ridge.
Weren’t we due?
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| Red line traces the route behind us |
We had traveled 10.3 km from the trailhead when our ridgewalk came to an end.
From here, the trail made a hairpin turn to the southeast and rapidly descended laterally across yet another deep snowy avalanche zone.
The trail was quickly lost once again, but this time the footprints from the other three hikers were apparent for the next 1.5 km or so.
We jubilantly boot-skied down the steep slope, losing 300 metres of elevation in the first kilometre before curving east and into thick forest.
The new easterly direction of travel gave us an impressive profile view of the Terrifying Wall of Death, four kilometres as the crow flies, across Wall Lake.
Once we’d made it down the avalanche slope and into the forest, we completely lost the trail once again.
We used visible landmarks and our GemTrek map to get a general idea of the direction we needed to travel to reach the northwest shore of Wall Lake.
As we emerged from the trees again and crossed a massive snow-covered meadow, I was suddenly stricken with an overwhelming wave of heat and light-headedness.
Yep, I had heatstroke.
My radiator had blown and steam was coming out of my valves.
I was nauseous, chilled, sweating, clammy, and roasting all at the same time.
We had been hiking for over six hours without shade in temperatures approaching 30 degrees.
I desperately needed to get to shade, but the nearest protection from the sun was Wall Lake and it was still a thousand metres away and we were off-trail.
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| Grizzly scat on top of the ridge |
I scooped up handfuls of snow and wrapped them in my bandana and held it to the back of my neck, my temples, and my forehead to cool down my overheated engine.
I pushed hard for the lake, apologetically leaving Nicky behind at some points in a desperate run for safety.
I knew we were still hours from the truck and I needed to get my health back up to 100% if I hoped to make it home.
The moment we finally left the hellish searing heat behind and oozed into the cool and moist sanctuary of shady forest was accompanied by an overwhelming sense of relief.
I didn’t feel any better, but I knew the heat would soon stop slow-cooking me from the inside.
It was on the final few hundred yards of cool muddy trail to the edge of Wall Lake that the bottom completely fell out of my backpack.
“Nooo, you’ve got to be kidding me!” I groaned, as all of my gear splatted into the mud.
I slumped to my knees.
I didn’t have the strength to cope with this new crisis.
Nicky, seemingly still unencumbered by heatstroke, immediately sprang into action.
She picked up all of my bits and pieces and packed most of them into her own pack.
This was a necessary yet nearly unbearable blow to my ego.
I take great pride in the fact that nobody carries my gear, ever.
I protested weakly.
Nicky insisted, reassuring me that this didn’t quite count as somebody carrying my gear since it wasn’t really my fault, and she knew that if my bag was intact I’d be carrying my own stuff, heatstroke or no heatstroke.
She also solemnly vowed to never breathe a word to anybody that I didn’t carry my own stuff for the last five kilometres of Akamina Ridge.
And so, to acknowledge her generosity, I am now admitting it to the world.
Alright!
So Nicky carried my stuff, okay?
So what?
No need to make a federal case out of it.
My helpless misery was temporarily alleviated when Nicky exclaimed “bear print!”
We both crouched in the mud to photograph the perfect imprint of the front paw of a bear.
Where was that darn thing?
We took several nanoseconds to take in the splendor of Wall Lake.
Fatigue and heatstroke were extenuating circumstances in the decision to proceed without stopping long enough to appreciate Wall Lake beyond noting the staggering heights to which the walls of Akamina Ridge rose above it.
It boggled our minds that we had been up there hours earlier.
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| Suffering badly from heatstroke (photo Nicky Blackshaw) |
As we rounded the northeast shore of Wall Lake and turned north away from the water’s edge, my heatstroke took an unfair turn for the worse.
I suddenly felt unable to continue.
I felt like I was going to throw up and faint and seizure all at the same time.
Through nothing short of a miracle, I did none of those things.
Again, the quick-thinking Nicky stepped up to the call of duty by taking my jacket and fanning me vigorously with it in the breezeless heat of the forest.
She soaked my bandana and I pressed it to my temples and the back of my neck.
Ten minutes later, I felt well enough to attempt to walk another hundred yards or so.
We carried on like this; slowly, with me requiring frequent fan and wet bandana breaks.
And then the mosquitoes appeared.
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| Wall Lake and the ridge where we'd been hours earlier |
I grew up in north coastal B.C., so I am no stranger to biting insects.
Mosquitoes are irritating, black flies are ridiculously ruthless in their greedy appetite for blood, and horseflies are just plain mean.
But Akamina mosquitoes are worse than all three of those insects combined.
They were attacking us in swarms.
I could clearly make out little swastikas on their wings as they dive-bombed us by the thousands.
We doused ourselves in DEET, but the kamikaze mosquitoes would fly in first, swarm us and scrub off all the repellent with little brushes and buckets of soapy water, and immediately behind them the ravenous warrior mosquitoes had a clear shot at our acres and acres of exposed skin.
We had to move fast.
Moving fast was a challenge in itself because of my long-since exploded thermostat.
I had to consider:
would I rather die secondary to complications from my brain reaching the boiling point and bubbling out my ears or would it be preferable to let the mosquitoes have their way and end up a mere pile of bones on the forest floor within an hour?
I opted to die from heatstroke, and we booted it.
And then my knee blew.
As if a red hot poker had just been removed from the embers and stabbed into my meniscus, a searing jolt of electric pain shot through my knee and nearly dropped me to the ground.
What the &%$# was that?
I steadied myself and tested my knee’s ability to bear weight at the dead run required to out-maneuver the swarm.
Nope, no good.
My knee was done.
What on earth had happened to it when I felt that pop back on the slippery avalanche slope at Forum Lake?
Whatever it was, I couldn’t bear weight on that joint when my body weight was forward of the knee.
And so I hop-ran down the hill, Terry Fox-style, with my left knee bearing double the weight it was designed to carry.
And I did this for over two thousand metres until we could see the truck, at which point I think I may have crawled the last few inches to my beloved vehicle, collapsed on the ground, and lay there on my back for an immeasurable period of time.
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| 40 hot km in two days and I got nuthin' left |
We completed this hike in nine hours and ten minutes.
The warm asiago garlic dip and two bite brownies that had both reached a distasteful body temperature in my truck did not stand a chance against our ravenous appetites.
We licked all the packages clean before swapping our hiking boots for flip flops, draining our canteens, and stretching out all of our screaming muscles.
We then headed for home, a three hundred kilometre journey, during which Nicky nearly killed us both when she suddenly screamed in terror as if her life was ending and started frantically beating a poor hapless spider to a pulp with the brownie bag.
As the startled and confused driver of a two and a half ton vehicle hurtling down the single lane highway at great speed, I struggled to control the truck while my brain frantically tried to comprehend what the commotion was.
When I realized a mountain had been made of a molehill, I regrettably retaliated in anger at poor Nicky, who was still quivering from the near death experience with the minuscule arachnid hitch-hiker that had almost certainly meant to do her in.
Yes, the Akamina Ridge trail was one of my hardest-earned trail triumphs to date.
But it was worth every moment of agony.
Views like that cannot be bought except with the astronomical price of blood, sweat, and tears.
You get what you pay for.
Akamina Ridge, I will love you forever.
