Little Beehive - July 24 2022

Bow Range, Lake Louise, Alberta
2210m

After the last hike our little "work remotely in the Rockies" group did (Sanson Peak and Sulphur Mountain), we came to understand that we definitely needed to find places that had objectives for the 2 levels of our party. So, after quite too long zooming around various maps, we decided that going to the Lake Agnes area by Lake Louise was the best call. Me and Logan had previously gone to the Big Beehive and Devils Thumb, and knew them to be fairly accessible and good payoff, with interesting things to do on the mountain and at the base (since we expected to take longer), so we sent our friends off that way, and set our eyes on a larger objective: bag all the peaks around the lake. As mentioned, we'd done those two, but not tracked them, so we wanted to get them logged. The peak in this post, as well as Mount St Piran were "close enough" to be doable, and 2 nice scrambling objectives (Mount Niblock and Mount Whyte, a medium and hard in Alan Kane's book) looked quite enticing. So, a plan was made, a stupidly early alarm to ensure parking was set, and not-enough-sleep later we got started at just after 6am (for what it's worth, parking was full at Moraine Lake already, but there was tons available at Louise).

The hike was honestly pretty simple and straightforward, the path is very well defined and broken, since this is a heavily trafficked area and this peak is not very difficult. We walked up gentle switchbacks for 35 minutes until we got to Mirror Lake, and grabbed a quick photo of the Big Beehive, and continued on.

From there, it was another 25 minutes of walking on fairly gentle switchbacks, until we got close to the St Piran fork, where it got slightly steeper (but not significantly so), and that continued to the summit. The rather pedestrian trail, plus us having a very long day ahead resulted in not many photo-op breaks on the way, so we got to the peak, took a few photos to give me something to put here, and moved on in a couple minutes. An hour to gain almost 500m and 5km felt pretty good, so we were feeling optimistic about not having to repeat the previous outing's nighttime descent, and off to Mount St Piran.

GPX Track + Map