Last weekend Meg and I decided to check out one of the many great hiking trails in the Crows-nest Pass, looking to satisfy an urge to hike up something steep but not too steep and within an hours drive away. Enter the trail to Window Mountain Lake…
I’d first heard about this said trail after eves dropping on a conversation I heard at the gym, about a hike to a beautiful alpine lake with spectacular views and few people due to it’s relatively rugged access road. I was intrigued so after doing a bit of research online, we were confident that we could reach the trailhead or at least within a few km’s with our SUV.
Driving east on highway 3 for about 45 minutes, we turned onto Alison creek road and followed our online instructions which led us down an old logging road. Turning off this road we hit an even more rugged path which we made about 2km down before having to park in a turnout. To our luck we were only had a short walk to the actual trailhead and as we slowly moved on, we could see a small number of other vehicles that hadn’t quite made it through the rocky road either.
The trail is well marked the whole way with orange circles or WML (Window Mountain Lake) markings on the rocks lining the trail which is more like a rocky river bed for the first 20 minutes or so. Once you hit the trees, you’ll see a final trail marker which also marks where the trail will get steeper for the next 20 minutes. After this the trail flattens out with a walk through beautiful old growth forest and as you near the lake you’ll see the some of the primitive campsites before arriving at the shore.
We took some time chilling around the lake and had some lunch on a small island you can rock hop to on the lookers right. We continued all the way around the lake after, heading through some thick bush and overgrown trail at times. Once through the other end of the lake we hiked up along the rock and shale up to a nice vantage point looking back down. We made it about 3/4 of the way up but didn’t make the summit or see the famous “window” for which the lake is named after. We figured for a first outing here we were satisfied with our little exploration and would come back to camp and scramble all the way to the peak next time.
We made our way down fairly quickly, passing a group of young guys setting up camp for the evening. Apart from them, we had only passed a handful of people all day which was a nice bonus. The sun was still strong on the final walk to the car and our legs still felt good as we picked a few wild strawberries and vowed to return later in the year. Definitely a worth while hike with a high reward to effort ratio!
Hoo was here 