No Bounds

February 20, 2012, Waterton National Park, Ski Cameron Lake and Forum Falls, solo.

I arrived at the Cameron Lake Staging area before 10 AM on the Cameron Lake road. By 10 AM I had my skis on and was starting down the trail. There were a few centimeters of fresh snow and it seemed to me that, so far, I was the first park visitor to ski to Cameron Lake. As I started out there was light snow falling.

The Canada-USA International Boundary cuts through the south end of Cameron Lake and my goal was to ski to that boundary. Skiing to the lake was easy but at the lake there is a sign that says Nordic Ski Trail Ends here. Up to the sign there was a track but beyond that sign there were no tracks to follow.

I have skied on Cameron Lake before but on every previous occasion I had a track to follow and I had only skied around the west shore of the lake. This time I was striking out into the middle of the lake. Still I was pretty confident, that is until I got about 500 m from shore on the the frozen lake. My ski poles seemed to be going into the snow rather far. I remembered that a just a week earlier Waterton Lake was not entirely frozen over in places. I probed deeper with my ski pole. The poles went in to within about 10 cm of the top the pole. When I pulled the pole back out there was wet slush on the basket at the bottom of the pole. I began to wonder if I might be skiing on snow over water rather than over ice and perhaps the whole surface might collapse beneath me. I have walked on frozen lakes before, anyone reading my earlier posts will know this, but I now felt that I was walking into 'uncharted' territory in which I have little experience. Nevertheless, I continued on. I probed the snow ahead to ensure that there was solid ice beneath it. Often the crusted snow would slump beneath my weight and give a soft whoosh as it did so. This feeling and the fracturing sound only served to heighten my trepidation of skiing on a frozen mountain lake. My response was to alter my route by drifting east and closer to the east shoreline of the lake. Presently I made it to a rock point that juts into the lake and I was happy to relax on that bit of 'Terra Firma'. I was some what dismayed, however, when I checked my GPS and realized that I had another 500 metres to go to get to the international boundary. Up to this point there is a continuous tree cover along the shoreline of Cameron Lake. The tree cover is a good indication that there is no risk of an avalanche. Beyond the point the slopes steepen and the tree cover dwindles away and the risk of avalanche increases. My assumption then was that I would be skiing the next 500 metres adjacent to a possible avalanche zone. I have no training or experience with avalanche areas and so I am not certain how far out an avalanche, if one were to be triggered, would extend into the lake. I simply reckoned what a safe distance from shore might be and I tried to maintain that distance. The 500 metres distance eventually became 800 or 900 metres because my route kept drifting to the west and the required course corrections resulted jn me having to go further. Eventually I reached 49 degrees latitude as indicated on my GPS. Once there I took a moment to check my position on the GPS map which indicated that the boundary was just a little further south. I really wanted to turn back right then as I felt to go further would be tempting fate. The snow fall had increased to near white out conditions and the mountain at the south end of Cameron Lake now loomed in front of me as a huge wall of grey rock, white snow and blue ice. The stark whiteness of the falling snow made the mountain seem all the more gigantic. I could see no top to it and no clear way to distinguish the base of the mountain from the shoreline of the lake. A quiet had descended with the snow. It was the kind of quiet that only comes in winter and is only deepened by a heavy winter snow fall. There is a rather intense feeling of peacefulness and calm to be felt in these places. A feeling which is made all the more intense by the possibility, real or imagined, that something above me or below me or beside be might break loose and bring a shattering and cataclysmic end to it. Nevertheless, I was compelled to continue on. I watched the pointer on the GPS inch steadily south toward the imaginary line that indicated the Canada - USA boundary. I only covered another 150 meters and then I was certain that I had crossed the boundary line into the USA. That 150 metres might well have been miles and the minutes it took might well have been an eternity!

I tarried at the boundary only long enough to set a Waypoint and take a couple of snapshots. It was a relief, indeed, to now be following my own tracks back.

The distance from the parking lot to the international boundary and then back to the east point = 6.4 km.
1 hr. 57 min moving, 21 min stopped.
My moving ave. was 3.3 km/hr., a fair average for having to break trail a lot of the way.