Lake Moraine & Consolation Lake

We woke up at 5am as we were going to Lake Moraine. I had booked tickets for the 6:30am time slot for the shuttle, so we wanted to make sure we had enough time to park and check in. We organised all our items for the day and packed extra layers as it was quite cold.

We arrived in the parking lot and started sorting out our bags for the day when Scott realised we forgot the food bag! I couldn’t believe it as I had been holding it when we left the accommodation. We checked everywhere….and we had definitely left it behind. We checked the backpacks and noticed we had a handful of nuts, 2 bruised apples and 2 kiwi fruit. We hoped it would be enough food for the day!

We checked into the shuttle and got on the bus. It had started to drizzle, so I checked the weather and the forecast was expecting 0.3mm of rain, and to clear up later in the morning. It took 30 minutes to drive to Lake Moraine, and the sunrise was at 8am. We walked up to the Rockpile and waited for the sunrise. The rain got heavier and heavier and we couldn’t see much but clouds surrounding the lake and there was no sunrise!

At 8am we started on our walk, and we had only walked about 200m when we decided it probably wasn’t worth it as if we walked to Sentinel Pass we probably wouldn’t see anything with the rain. We decided to walk to Consolation Lake first and see if the weather cleared. It was 3km to Consolation Lake, and at times it seemed the rain was clearing only for it to start again.

We arrived at the lake, and unfortunately the mountains were covered in clouds. We had to scramble over slippery rocks to get close to the waters edge. We were both cold, and had also forgotten our l wet weather over-pants so my legs were started to soak through the hiking pants. I was feeling quite miserable and with the weather not clearing we walked back along the trail and decided to get the shuttle back to the car.

When we got on the bus, the driver said that a grizzly bear had been sighted on some rocks near the road na to keep a look out. The whole bus was looking and the driver slowed down, but unfortunately we couldn’t see it. Scott thought he saw something brown but wasn’t sure if it was a bear. We arrived back at the parking lot and grabbed a coffee from the Lake Louise Ski Resort. We were both cold so the coffee warmed us up.

We decided to head back to our accommodation in Banff to change into dry clothes and warm up. We arrived back at 12:30pm and had lunch. We both relaxed and read our books before napping in the afternoon. We were thinking of driving to Radium Hot Springs but it was 1.5 hours away and the reviews were it wasn’t very warm and it was like a public pool. We decided to use the hot tub at the accommodation which was outside and really warm instead.

We organised dinner which was butter chicken and quinoa before ensuring all our food was ready for the next day. We had an early night as we would be getting up early again the next day.Read more