Mount St. Piran

Mount St. Piran
8690 feet (2649 meters) elevation
Alberta, Canada
51.41 degrees N
116.25 degrees W

Here we are, myself, Chris and Tim on the summit of Mount St. Piran. We started out on Sunday morning at 10am, and drove up to Lake Louise inside Banff National Park. From there we headed up the trail past the lake. About an hour later, on a fairly easy well maintained trail, we saw Mirror Lake. A little while later we passed the St. Anne Teahouse, and kept on marching.

The guide book gave specific instructions on how to find the trail up to the summit, and Tim's altimeter helped too. At this point the trail becomes single track, starts getting steeper and rockier. This is when you start gaining altitude much quicker.

The weather started closing in a bit, and people coming down from the summit told us it was cold and the clouds were closing in up there. Undeterred, we kept on marching.

The trees started getting smaller, and then eventually there are no trees. It's too rocky above a certain altitude for trees to grow. We hit a plateau and re-evaluated. It was snowing fairly hard now, and we were basically inside a cloud. However Chris's altimeter told us we only had another 200 feet or so to the summit... so... we kept on marching.

It was a great feeling to reach the top. Unfortunately, as I said, we were inside a cloud, so the promised views of several other mountains and ice fields were obscured. I didn't mind much, and we munched on trail mix as we signed the summit log.

On the way down, it was snowing harder. Once we got a bit lower, it turned to sleet, then rain. We stopped in the awesome little St. Anne teahouse (where the owner's family and a few summer students live, and serve tea, sandwiches and baked goods with no electricity or plumbing, 1500 feet above Lake Louise).

What a great day. Tim and Chris set a pretty fast pace (probably a little faster than I would have set myself) but the burn today feels great.

Mount St. Piran is one of the easiest "climbs" in Banff National Park. It's what they call a "scramble" or a "hike". But it is my first summit. I've done a lot of decent hikes in Switzerland, at very high altitudes, but never been to the top of a mountain, where you could look around and not see anything higher than what you were standing on.

I feel great about the climb. However, this has been a somewhat dispassionate post. It's because I'm kind of in turmoil over something happening to a friend of mine right now. In fact I can't remember the last time I was this emotional about, well, anything really Not even when I got dumped by my first "boyfriend" in 3 years. This friend of mine is going through a really wacky time, and I don't know what to do about it.

That's why I had a great time on the hike... there's only one desicion to make: stop and sit down, or keep on marching.