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Rocky Mountain Ramblers Association

Trip Report
Trip Date:
21-Jan-2018
Activity:
Snowshoeing
Trip name:
Boulton Creek to Pocaterra Hut
Coordinator:
Jennifer
Report:
We had a fabulous offtrail hike today.  On agreement of all participants, we decided to start from Boulton Creek rather than William Watson Lodge to increase the length of our trip by a few km. Jennifer and Barb had separately been in groups who had broken trail along the 2 parts of our off-trail route in the past couple of weeks so knew that there would be a good base throughout.

We started from Boulton Campground Shower building and walked along the side of Packers ski trail a short distance before turning off trail to follow the creek that leads to Marl Lake. 



Starting out along the creek

There was about 4-5" of new snow on top of the trail broken 2 weeks ago, but the base was good. The previous trip encountered some open water under the snow about half-way to Marl Lake, so we watched for that; it had frozen and posed no problem this week, but about half a kilometre further, we encountered a lot of open water under the snow along the trail which got deeper (several inches over our snowshoes, but not over our boot tops) so we retreated and made our way further to the side of the valley where we escaped the open water and were able to continue without incident. We were pleasantly surprised that our snowshoes didn't clump up with ice and luckily none of us got wet feet.  There are lovely views all along this route, which goes along 3 lakes in the valleys leading to Pocaterra Hut.



Dave, Jennifer, Brenda at Marl Lake




View from Sparrow Egg Lake


We stopped for lunch in the bright sun at the far end of Sparrow Egg lake, then continued through trees to Rockwall Lake and ended at Pocaterra Hut.



Barb, Dave, Jennifer approaching Rockwall Lake


We saw few people all day - a couple of skiers on Packers, a few snowshoers near Marl Lake and a lone walker on our snowshoe trail near the Hut.
Thanks to Jennifer for calling this trip, which was new to 2 of the participants, from Brenda(p),David and Barb (p,s)



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