Lake O’Hara, British Columbia, Canada

The next four days we spent at beautiful Lake O’Hara.
Surprise, surprise, but more rain!  We boarded the bright yellow school bus bound for Lake O’Hara with a group of other campers.  They limit the number of people that can head up to the lake to 40/day.  This is to protect the natural beauty of the area and to restore a lot of the trampled habitat.  Because of this, we had to book the bus and campsite 3 months in advance, and had been looking forward to it.  It did not disappoint.

The campground was like a little community, with communal cooking shelters/warming huts and a big fire pit where we could all gather when it wasn’t raining. The hiking around the alpine circuits was amazing in spite of the rain. The mist and low-lying clouds added to the atmosphere, and once they lifted, the colours were more vibrant, if anything. The first larches were turning gold too. For those of you who don't know, larches are unusual trees because they are the only pine-needle tree that will change colour in autumn and lose its needles.

Anyway, we had fun meeting a variety of people on the trails and at the campsite. At the end of each day we would take shelter from the rain and cook dinner in the kitchen huts sharing stories of the day’s adventures with other campers. We decided to stay an extra night as there was space due to poor weather, and to our surprise, we found little food packages and farewell notes in our bear locker from friends we’d made whom we'd told. We couldn’t believe it. It made us feel good that people are so generous despite only knowing them for a day or so.

On the evenings that it didn’t rain, we sat around the group fire pit and had great laughs and made smores (again generously donated by new friends who had left that day). I will have to explain smores as they are a very north American thing and we don’t 'do' them in England. They are basically a sandwich that you make around the campfire made with a freshly melted-on-the fire marshmallow with a square of (unmelted) chocolate and placed between 2 graham crackers (biscuits). They can only be eaten whole so you have to cram them in your mouth in one go, and if it's done correctly, the chocolate should melt from the heat of the marshmallow.
We did not want to leave this beautiful place, but know that we aim to come back again, as seems to be the norm with most of the people we met who come back year after year. * Mush

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