Della Falls via Cream Lake

The story below outlines aour actual trip. To review what we had planned, see the Expedition Outline.

This years expedition was to be a slow paced, 5 day trip travelling mostly in alpine meadows. Plans are always subject to change, and this one did as soon as we were on the trail.

We started off at the trail head at 3:30pm on June 26. The weather was good, spirits were high and the first day was a liesurly 3 hours to our first camp site. This was a tight squeeze to fit our two tents between the trees. Any more tents, and our camp would sprawl out into the forest along the river shown in the banner picture. It would still be comfortable, but it would be spread out.

The second day was when we started to deviate from our planned trip. We were awake in plenty of time and had a great breakfast. The bugs were irritating, but tollerable and the weather was great. However, it took us almost 4.5 hours to get to the river crossing. This whole day was only supposed to be 5 hours. The views of the oposing ridge were great. See the waterfall in the picture at right. We didn't run into any difficult terrain, so this was just a planning error. We still had the big uphill to complete which was estimated to be 3 hours. To make things worse, a day hiker that had passed us during breakfast, told us that the lake was frozen over and there was a pricarious snow bridge over a river that we had to cross.

As I said, spirits were high and we crossed the Price Creek river at 1:30pm with a new bounce in our step having just finished lunch. We started to encounter snow around the 800 meter elevation mark, which was only about 70 meters below the snow bridge and the river we needed to cross. The snow got deep very quickly, so by the time we got up to the river crossing, there was at least 5 feet of hard packed snow to walk on. Having donned our crampons, we scrambled across the snow bridge and up to the start of the avalanch run like weary goats (hey - we were gettin' tired after 7 hours on the trail).

We spent two more hours crossing the avalanche run, shown at left, and going up a very steep (60 degrees) snow slop before we were at the edge of Cream Lake. Sure enough, the lake was frozen over. We had to hike about 10 minutes just to get water from the river that runs out of Cream Lake. The view was very nice, but it was difficult to keep everyone positive after 9.5 hours of hiking over difficult terrain. From our camp site, we could seet Mt. Septimus (north west arm only), Big Interior (mountain in banner picture) and the nine peaks (shown below) looking across the fozen lake.

The third day called for about 8 hours of traveling accross the snow with full packs. This was a little more than any of us was prepared to do, considering that the previous day we had hiked for 9.5 hours. It was decided that we would not press on to Della Falls, but would do a day hike up Mt. Septimus and return to our camp, and on the fourth day start our descent.

We skirted around the wast side of Cream Lake to get a demoralizing view of the snow slope that we would ascent on the west side of Mt. Septimus. This picture is very decieving. The upper half where the snow bends to the right is actually about twice as long as the lower straight half. It's just so darned far away. With only 10 pound day packs, it took us 2 full hours to ascent this monster, but the view from the top was well worth it. You can see a panaramic picture at the end of this article. It may be wider than your screen. As you can see from these pictures, the weather couldn't have been any better.

The view from the top looking back down to Cream Lake gives you an idea of how far away we are.

We saw flowers at the top, along with snow worms and two different spiecies of spiders. It's hard to believe that anything actually lives in this snowy landscape.

On the forth day we started our descent. We left the camp around 8:30am. We wanted an early start because we wanted to get to the snow bridge before the sun started to melt it. You can see Yvonne crossing the snow bridge with the waterfall in the background. All of that water travels beneath her as she gingerly awaits the click of the camara shutter.

With so much snow on the hillside, it burried the trail. It took us a little while to find the trail once we were no longer on the snow. We had lunch on what is most likely the steepest part of the whole trail. We sat on the trail and dangled our legs over the edge. Without the worn walkway, we would simply slide down to the bottom (much worse for wear).

It took us 4.5 hours to get down to the Price Creak crossing. This was surprising, since we went up the trail in only 5 hours.

We had a large snack (almost a second lunch) and proceeded back to our first camp site. The open forest and clearly marked trail were a joy to be on after the technical snow of the morning. We got back to our first camp site at 6:00pm and had dinner, but none of us wanted to spend the night, knowing that we were only 2 hours from the trail head and the possibility of eating a hamburger! After dinner we pressed on to the trail head and were massaging our feet by 8:30.

A quick bath and we were on our way for real food.