Hike to Abbott Ridge and Marion Lake

Posted on June 24, 2015 by Phil

Glacier National Park

Read slowly – Illecillewaet. Yup. We stayed at the Illecillewaet Campground next to the Illecillewaet river bringing water down to the Illecillewaet valley from Illecillewaet glacier. 3 days and we still could not remember, left alone pronounce that name.

But the 6 hours hike (lots of stops to enjoy the view, though) up 1’000 meters of altitude to the Abbot Ridge with fantastic views of the surrounding glaciers, Rodgers Pass and the Illecillewaet (last time) valley was a great one. It’s already the end of June but there were still many patches of snow and even one rather impressive steep snowfield we had to carefully cross to continue to the ridge. All the way up, about 3 hours, we met not a single soul. Fresh footsteps in the melting snow, however, indicated that somebody else must have walked up before us. And indeed, two young women sitting at the top, enjoying the grand view. Two women from Winterthur, Switzerland. It is about a 45 minutes drive from where we live and almost 10’000 km from here. Small world. One of them hiked the famous West Coast Trail on Vancouver Island and made us want to hike it as well. Later we checked and it turned out that all the 50 daily slots were already booked for the period we could consider.

After chatting away with them for a while at the top, we started the descent, but this time taking a shortcut to avoid the snowfield.

I use a little toy app to record tracks and get some stats. It told me that whereas we were on the trail for about 6 hours, we actually hiked only 3.5 hours. This is our rhythm. We love to hike to see and enjoy the nature, often sitting silently on a rock doing nothing else than admire the beauty around us.

Back “home” the second round of Japanese curry refilled our energy tanks. Oishiikata (tasty it was).