Glorious views as we traveled today!
Picturesque drive!!
EMERALD LAKE
Parking is very limited. We had to park quite a ways down the road, but it was worth it. Walking along I saw this big black bug!
It was a White-Spotted Sawyer Beetle, a wood-boring beetle found throughout North America.
We decided to do the hike around the lake. We went counter-clockwise.
Test your balance section!
And it went for quite a ways (and not just straight)! I finally had to put my phone in the pocket opposite my water bottle when I realized the curves and the end not in sight. 🙂 Yes, you could have walked through the middle and constantly stepped over the horizontal pieces, but what fun would that have been? AND sections of that were quite muddy.
Emerald Lake, like all mountain lakes are almost ice-cold and cannot support much life. Suspended rock flour (made by the grinding up of rocks by glaciers) gives the lake its brilliant color but reduces visibility and cuts the penetration of sunlight. Plants can’t grow in the dark and fish must be able to see in order to find much of their food.
A balance of life is still reached in this chilly, murky lake. A few water plants-mostly in shallower water, and a small population of one-celled plants and animals are food for some freshwater shrimp and small fish called sculpins. Enough shrimp are present to feed the lake’s biggest residents: brook and rainbow trout, and Dolly Varden char. Nature is pretty amazing.
Places like Yellowstone National Park have invasive brook trout because they were not native in those waters. When brook trout are introduced to new places, they aggressively outcompete and displace native fish because they grow and reproduce quickly. Here and Eastern North America they are native to streams and lakes. (Emerald Lake seems like it would be more western than eastern, but they apparently are fine here.)
Where the water is shallow it is crystal clear! This section seemed very inviting to wade in or go for a dip.
Cool boardwalk bridge over heavy flow of snow/glacier melt into Emerald Lake.
The vegetation and terrain changed as we progressed around the lake.
The condition of the trail also was varied. Although none of it was that bad, but balance was important in the “work-in-progress” section.
“Strange Companions”
“The lake is filling in more gently and gradually here.
While rocks, gravel and heavier materials are dumped upstream to add to the alluvial fan you see on your right and behind you, the finer and lighter silt is carried by the stream until its flow is almost stopped at the lake’s edge. This build-up of fine, sandy silt is a delta and as it builds out into the lake, the fan built out onto the delta.
This building up of an alluvial fan on top of a delta is unusual in the Rocky Mountains where both processes rarely occur together in this way.”
Lodging options across the lake close to where we started around the lake.
What do you think?
For me the toughest part of the hike was near the end when we came to a huge area of snow/ice covered trail. I didn’t see an easy way around it, so we went up and over. It was definitely slippery!
You’d think with all that dirt and twigs all over the packed snow/ice it would be easy to get over and down to the pavement. It didn’t. Not enough anyway. 🙂
We were glad we made a lengthy stop at Emerald Lake. We headed back to Sadie and continued on to our site at Lake Louise Campground. (We stayed here last year.) It is the closest campground to visit Lake Louise. We only plan to be here basically to shower and sleep.
We finally got a shuttle reservation to Moraine Lake for June 16!! Tomorrow, June 15, we will go early to Lake Louise to get an RV parking spot, so we can check out the big hotel there, the lake itself (again) and make sure we know where we need to be at 4:30 AM the next morning!
