Elevation, elevation, elevation. In the hiker’s guide to real estate, elevation is everything. My wife, Lynn, and I are re-learning this maxim one early morning in late June as we trudge through waist-deep snow on our way to Opabin Prospect, a promontory pedestal overlooking Lake O’Hara in Yoho National Park (a short drive from Banff, one of the first stops after you cross the Alberta border into British Columbia). Barely an hour ago, a short 200 metres below where we now stand, we sat sipping coffee on the sun-dappled porch of the Lake O’Hara Lodge, looking out over a complete spectrum of green: lime-tinted moss, avocado-coloured lichen, freshly sprouted pine needles and the legendary emerald hue of the lake itself. The scene at the lake’s rocky shore was made brighter by the snow, which still covers the pointy Wiwaxy Peaks and the majestic Mount Huber. The sun, reflecting off its banks, shed light down onto the lake from every direction as though it were a stage set.
From this exquisite alpine summer we have returned in a flash to deep winter: not just snow, but chill wind and frozen earlobes. We are not disappointed, even though we have lost the trail and cannot find our way to Opabin’s lookout. We simply look up above the treetops and orient ourselves by the location of the white peaks. “Mountaintops are not meant to be cleared of snow,” Lynn remarks, and I concur. We have been here many times before—O’Hara is a lodestone for us—but always in July and August, when the thaw is long over and O’Hara is surrounded by massifs of indiscriminate grey. At this time of year snow becomes them, making their topographic quirks and crags visible to the naked eye from kilometres away. The ice sparkles atop Huber’s ring of ledges, turning it into a bejewelled crown. It’s just what we had hoped for, because we have come this time for the sole purpose of watching it all come crashing down.

ake O’Hara is one of those renowned Rockies destinations that would be labelled overhyped and shamefully tourist-trod were it not for the fact that access is restricted. The Lake O’Hara parking lot hardly lives up to its name, being situated more than 10 kilometres from the place itself. The only vehicles allowed along the rickety fire road, which runs astride the nondescript Cataract Brook, are delivery trucks and Parks Canada’s bus, which runs only four times a day. Seats are available to day hikers and campers for $14.50, provided they reserve well in advance. In summer, the O’Hara bus is one of the hottest tickets anywhere west of Calgary, even during Stampede week, which only enhances the lake’s reputation as the Rockies’ must-see destination. Those with reservations dare not be late. Hitchhiking backpackers and RV tourists often show up hoping for a last-minute cancellation or no-show. They are usually turned away.
The lodge itself is one of the original pioneers in the now-burgeoning tourist trade in backcountry luxury: simple, elegant lodging and exquisite food for wilderness lovers. It was built in 1926 by the Canadian Pacific Railway—despite being a lengthy carriage ride from the nearest station—as a destination for the CPR’s more adventuresome travellers. It has since gone through a succession of private owners. The hotel has undergone repairs, upgrades and tiny revolutions (they recently turned the wine list into a B.C.-only affair), but its primary calling has never changed. And to hear Bruce Millar tell it, neither has the guest list. “We have couples who have been coming the same week, every year, for decades.” Every spring he and his co-manager wife, Alison (they are also part of the current ownership group), sit down with all the reservation requests for their eight lodge rooms and 15 cabins and try to slot them into the calendar. The longstanding regulars get priority. Just about the only time you can get a room on short notice is during late June.
It’s worth asking what we keep coming back for. Though Lynn and I return to this area as often as we can, this is our first stay in the resort, which has its quirks. The 16 guests staying in the lodge must share one bathroom for men and one for ladies—so much for Lynn’s love of long soaks in the tub. Every Saturday night the young staff put on a variety show for the guests, showcasing whatever talent they can muster, a quaint O’Hara tradition. But avid hikers will tell you that it’s hard to find a place with such a wide variety of accessible trails, and that they’d put up with consecutive nights of three-hour pan-flute recitals to have such hikes waiting for them at their doorstep when they wake up in the morning.
Then, of course, there’s the beauty. Everyone says Lake O’Hara is the most beautiful place in the world. Bruce Millar thought it was so stunning when he first worked here as a university student in the mid-1980s, he bought in. That way he’d never have to leave. “It’s 360 degrees around you,” he declares. Other scenic places in the Rockies have a focal point. But you stand here and look in any direction and go ‘Wow.’”
That’s the stock answer. No one ever answers the real question, about how the beauty of this place affects them, or why, like a rutting moose or a salmon swimming upstream, they are powerless to resist the pull. We return to Lake O’Hara because its beauty is the kind that commands humility, strips us of our bullshit and makes us feel like our pure selves again. Neither one of us finds respite by lying on a beach or taking in a stage production of Mamma Mia! We need to hit the trail so we can sweat it out, so we can shed the accumulated crust of urban gunk, career stress, parental frustration and all the other psychic detritus left behind by life’s legion of small disappointments. We never talked of visiting during avalanche season until this trip. Once the idea struck us, we got all excited about it: we would get to watch the mountains do as we do.

n most places the seasonal change from winter to spring happens in baby steps over the course of weeks: the weather slowly warms, the snow melts, the ground thaws then firms up and the trees take their sweet time to bloom. Not up here. As Lynn and I punch through the deep snow in search of prospect’s edge, the larch trees, the only member of the pine family to shed their foliage every winter, are making haste to get the most out of the short growing season, churning the mucky runoff up through their veins. I had never seen a pine tree bud before, and I doubt I will ever see any tree bud as furiously. I felt that if I stopped and watched for an hour the needles would extend before my eyes; if I pressed my cold ear to a
trunk I’d hear the sap pumping.
What I can hear, at ever-shorter intervals, are the resonating cracks of the avalanches. We are making haste now too, and finally emerge from the trees at the flat-topped edge of Opabin’s cliff just before noon’s high sun. Then we simply sit down, lay out our lodge-provided picnic lunch of sandwiches, fresh fruit and coffee, and take in the show. We are in the eye of a ferocious sunstorm, being spun round by claps and rumbles in all directions: Mount Huber to the north, Mount Odaray due west and all along the Schäffer Ridge from southwest to southeast. Before long we isolate each face’s active ledges, where the sun’s rays are finding purchase and the break of one avalanche triggers even more. We turn our focus to those places, so we can spot the slide first, then listen for its time-lapse booms and rattles.
Avalanches are all in search of the same thing—the shortest path to level ground—but we watch on Schäffer Ridge as each finds a different route to its own resting place. From a distance they all look alike in their initial leap off the cliff, but each one has broken away from a slightly different place on the snowbank, with its own momentum and centre of gravity. Each carves a slightly new trail for the next to follow, and each bounces unpredictably off the cliff’s outcrops.