Sun, Oct 4 2015 - Mt. Bourgeau: Part 2 (View Original Event Details)

Event Coordinator(s): Raihan K
Participants:Raihan K, Daisy Mae P, Seung L, chris w, Deanna P, Ken N, Ivan Y, Sonja G, Andrei S, CJ, Marina S

Write Up:
What a day! Our hike could best be described as a walk in the clouds! As we made our way through the first part in the forest, what we thought was fog, turned out to be clouds! At around 7,000 feet the tree tops were all snowy. Just beyond Bourgeau Lake, so was the ground. At Harvey Pass we knew we’d have to negotiate snow on the shoulder of the mountain too. Not only that, at times visibility was at best 200 feet. We pushed on, following some footsteps left by folks who had been up there the day before. At places I chose to break from the trail, mainly to keep our group a safe distance from the ledge on our left. For safety reasons, we broke into two groups for the summit push. We climbed above the clouds as we approached the weather station, and it was a surreal experience to observe the neighboring peaks drift in and out of view. Nine of our eleven made it to the summit. Two felt a little drained and opted to remain on the trail and wait for the others to come back down. We all came down safely to Harvey Pass together. This is when one member realized she had lost her little bag containing her microspikes and thought that she might have dropped them when she was adjusting layers a few hundred meters back. Some members of the party wanted to spend a bit of time at Bourgeau Lake. So once again, we split into two groups. This is when things got really interesting. Going back towards Mt Bourgeau, we saw a fairly large grizzly grazing and walking up towards the trail. So we immediately turned around. There were some hikers who were sitting at Harvey Pass observing the larch forest down below at sunshine and they were tracking the grizzly too. Luckily, this group had found the lost microspikes. We then proceeded towards Lake Bourgeau and just after crossing the hump from Harvey Lake, we met with a juvenile male black bear. The bear at first took a few steps towards us. That got us to backtrack up the path to Harvey Pass. We all drew our bear sprays and made a lot of noise. The bear then went behind some rocks. We clambered down a steeper section and came around back to the trail. This is when we saw the bear moving ahead of us on the other side of the small tarn just above Bourgeau Lake. It was headed back towards our trail ahead of us! What seemed to have happened, is that our ruckus got the bear trying to find cover, and as it moved away from us, it got closer and closer to the trail. We approached, making noise, and had three cans of bear spray drawn and ready. We blew whistles to warn the other half of our party at Bourgeau Lake. As we came down the switchbacks to Bourgeau Lake, the bear vanished into the woods. We had a fun time describing our little adventure to the rest of the gang who were chilling at Bourgeau Lake wondering what held us up. The hike back to the parking lot was uneventful (and felt very long after all the exertion). Everyone got back safely and seemed to have had a great time. I’ve uploaded my photos to a Flickr album. Here is the link. Feel free to download and share. https://flic.kr/s/aHskmExtby Cheers, Raihan