October 27, 2018
Actually, none of us was stoked.
That doesn’t mean it wasn’t an excellent day out though! Caitlin, Julien, Conrad and I just don’t seem to be of the “stoked” type. We had a long conversation about “stoke” and even practiced being stoked during our hike. I tried to recall when was the last time I was stoked, and sadly I couldn’t think about me using this word ever. Maybe I don’t even know what stoke is? It must be something for extreme extroverts? Google says stoked means insanely enthusiastic or eurphoric, but also says that it is informal and North American. Well, that must be the explanation, we are just not North American enough. Sorry.., I meant, I am so sorry.
9.20 am: We quietly hiked along the beautiful and muddy trail towards the first lake for a small break. I have already been to Tricouni the previous year in September with my sister Hanna and two friends Christiane and Sebastian, so I am including a picture from September 2017 too.
We quickly continued along the trail to gain some elevation towards the upper lakes. The trail had a lot of cool, feathery ice pillars growing and hiking over the boulders was challenging. The sun had not hit the rocks and a very thin layer of fluffy snow made them extremely slippery. We were a bit worried at that time that we would be either to slow or that the upper scramble would be very difficult and slippery too.
But the higher we got, the later and warmer it got and the boulders weren’t as slippery anymore. The trail and route finding is very straight forward and I don’t understand how I had gotten a little bit lost in the upper bolder field the previous year… We continued steeply past the upper lake and dropped into a small depression. From there it was about an hour to the summit, passing some snow patches on the way.
To gain the summit ridge, there is a little bit of scrambling, which I remembered to be quite easy from the year before. There was a fair amount of ice and snow this time of the year though, so we took our time to find a safe route up. There were also some animal tracks going up to the summit, probably marmot, the peak bagger. It didn’t have good mountaineering etiquette, since it left a tiny bit of poo on the summit. The summit was pretty cold, Caitlin and Julien were not in T-Shirts anymore.
We did not stay too long on the summit, since our hands were getting really cold and we needed those for the scramble down. It was a bit more difficult on the way down but doable and soon we were back on the trail towards the upper lake. We saw some cool “grassicles” on the way!
When we reached the lake, we thought it was time to have some fun with the thin ice that covered it. I decided that I wanted to take a picture of Tricouni through a hole in a sheet of ice, so I took some effort to lick one. Caitlin was happy to help, from the other side.
And here it is: Tricouni through the icehole… Then, we made our way down. It was quite pleasant, since only the first part of the trail is steep and you can relax your knees in the last hour of trail with some pleasant flat walking through a mix of forest and mud.
Hazel, the car, was still there and looking forward to suffer a couple of minor injuries on her underside. The logging road was definitely rough, and we should have probably parked a little bit lower..
And then we were stoked to be back in town – Aehm, nope, we weren’t..
