Hiking Lightning Lake in the E.C. Manning Provincial Park

Today we wanted to drive east to E.C. Manning Provincial Park, and our plan was to hike a falls trail. We set out southeast on Canada Highway 3 from Hope and our first stop was at the Hope Slide site. The Hope Slide was the largest landslide ever recorded in Canada. It occurred in the morning hours of January 9, 1965 in the Nicolum Valley east of Hope, and killed four people. Prior to the landslide, a small avalanche had forced four people to stop their vehicles a few miles southeast of Hope. As those people contemplated waiting for clearing crews or turning around, a second slide occurred and buried them, fatally.  Rescue crews only found two of the four bodies—the others have remained entombed under the rock since 1965. A Greyhound bus traveling to Hope was stopped just before the slide. The driver turned back and was credited with saving his passengers from a tragedy.

Here is a view of the mountain face that collapsed due to the slide:

The force of the slide was so strong that it sent the rubble (and water from a lake at the bottom of the canyon) high up the opposing canyon wall before all of the rubble settled at the bottom of the ravine. It was sobering to imagine the rocks being so deep that rescuers had no hope of finding two of the victims.

Further up Highway 3, we had our first encounter with the Skagit River.  Here in Canada, it anchors the Skagit Valley Provincial Park; but, further down the Skagit River, in the United States, the river forms the backbone of the North Cascades National Park, which we had visited on our hike around Ross Lake in the North Cascades of the State of Washington.  Here, close to its source at Allison Pass (which forms the boundary between the Fraser Valley, to the west, and the Okanagan Watershed, to the east), the river is smaller and wilder:

We topped 4,500 feet elevation and the pass.  Soon, we arrived at the Manning Resort Lodge, only to learn that the Three Falls Trail, which we had planned to hike, is blocked by snow and ice and would require snowshoes and crampons, which we had not packed.  Perhaps if we had thought about it, we might have guessed that regions above 4,000 feet might still have snow.  However, we had not thought about it.  So we asked for alternatives, and the resort employee suggested we hike around Lightning Lake.

At 4,000 feet above sea level, Lightning Lake still had an alpine character.  Our first view of the lake confirmed this:

After a quick lunch, we started out on the trail, only to discover that much of it was still snow-covered.  The resort employee had said, "It might be a little slushy."  However, this was NOT merely slushy, but snowy and even icy in places:

Along the whole trail, previous snowshoers and hikers had kept to a narrow path, packing down the snow into an icy elevated passage that varied between one and two feet above the level of the ground. Where the ground was bare, we could tell how high we were walking; where the ground was snow-covered, we were not so aware of our height, but it was easy to make a mistake and posthole into the soft, deep snow beside the snowshoe track:

We worked our way about a third of the way around the lake to the Rainbow Bridge, where we relaxed and took in the view:

Down lake, the view was spectacular, giving opportunities to see snow-capped peaks:

There were places where rockfall had obliterated the path, but the snow had allowed hikers to make passage across the boulder field.  This was icy in spots and made for some tricky walking:

After about 1.5 hours, we made our way to the bottom of the lake, and looked back up toward where we started:

Working our way back up the lake, we spotted some kayakers paddling placidly beneath the glacial peaks:

As we neared the end of our trail, we were treated to a spectacular view of the lake and surrounding snow-capped mountains.  As we hiked back to the truck, we tried to remember other hikes that were as scenic.  It wasn't easy to find any comparable experiences:

All in all, the hike was about 6.5 miles, which, in distance, doesn't seem long.  However, the entire path required us to choose between post-holing in deep snow or picking our way along a narrow, 9-inch snowshoe track that was icy and very slippery in spots.  There must have been 30 or 40 downed trees across the path, and each one challenged our climbing, ducking, bobbing and weaving skills. By the time we returned to the truck at 4:45 pm, our desire for outdoor adventure had been fully sated, and we rested peacefully on our 45 minute drive back to the campground in Hope.