Thwarted by Talus in Kluane National Park; Alaska Highway - Haines Junction to Destruction Bay [260624]

(Posted 260806) - It's not often that a trail gets the better of us, but the one we chose in Kluane National Park ended up being a little more than we could handle and we were unable to reach our destination.

(Editors' Note:  by an amazing coincidence, we're actually publishing this blog post from Haines Junction!  Only 41 days later after the events described in the blog post 😉, on one of two return trips through the village.)

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We were up at 8 a.m. Wednesday morning.  After our morning routine, we drove 23 km SE to the King's Throne Trailhead which was the starting point of our chosen hike for the day: the hike up to the "seat" of King's Throne (not the summit - we're not that crazy!).  The trail to the "seat" was pretty ambitious on paper - a 6 mile roundtrip with 1800 feet of elevation gain, over 50+% grades.  The ranger in the Visitor Centre yesterday had also warned us that the upper portion was over "talus" - a term we had never heard before (which, in retrospect, should have been a red flag warning sign 🙄).  We looked up "talus" to mean "a pile of loose rock debris at the base of a cliff" with the accompanying photos appearing to be of piles of small rocks.  We had hiked the Cinder Cone in Lassen before, which was also steep slopes of small loose (albeit volcanic) rock so we figured "how different/hard could it be"?  (The hike is listed as "Difficult" on the park's Easy / Moderate / Difficult scale, but we had nothing to compare that scale to.)

Armed with both cans of bear spray this time (we're learning! 😉) we started down the trail just after 10.  The first mile of the trail was easy: winding through the forest and mostly flat.

Near the end of the first mile we saw this ATV parked on the trail.  "Wait a minute.  We could've driven all this way instead of walking?  Can we just hop in and drive the rest of the way?"

Apparently not, because this little guy was strapped into the passenger's seat guarding the vehicle!  We continued onward on foot.

In the next 1/3 mile, the trail started sloping upward . . .

. . . and gradually became more steep and rocky.  As we started getting above the tree line, though, we began getting some pretty good views of Kathleen Lake and the surrounding mountains.

Fully above the tree line there's a little viewpoint set up, with a single little bench for all the hikers to share on their way up/down the mountain.  We stopped here for more photos, and took some photos for another couple as well.

At mile 2 things started getting ridiculous.  The trail split, and a worker there told us that he was working to try to restore "the old trail" which was harder to find but less sketchy than "the new trail" (which was easier to see, but harder to follow) to the left.  The "old trail" was suppose to go up the current hill, then hang a right and cross the hill on the right along the little line of vegetation that runs horizontally across it about 2/3 of the way up.  We watched the couple from the viewpoint go up it ahead of us, and they set off a fairly large rock slide as they went across (the worker's comment was "I'm glad that was just rocks and not them!")

We went up the hill, with Christine struggling to make it to what we thought was the crossover elevation point.  And once there, we couldn't find the line of vegetation that was supposed to mark the path across - it was all equally loose, slippery rock as far as we could tell.  We decided to turn back, and as luck would have it on our way back down the strap on Tom's camera decided to break!  Luckily, the hill was so steep that he was pretty much at a 45 degree angle from the ground (or vice versa - it was hard to tell, and didn't really matter) at the time so the camera only fell less than a foot.  And to be fair: this was largely our fault, since we've been watching the strap steadily fraying and wearing through for years now and have done nothing about it, but the timing of the breakage wasn't awesome since Tom really needed both hands to be free at the moment.  He managed to futz with it and get enough strap fabric free that he could tie an incredibly ugly but serviceable knot in it to finish the hike (although the resulting strap was noticeably shorter than usual).

When we got back to the trail split point, Tom decided that since we had come this far we shouldn't give up without at least taking a look at "the new trail" to see if it was passable.  He went up the trail a bit and it didn't seem too bad, so Christine joined him.  We made it about halfway up the hill, and then gave up.  Maybe if it hadn't been lightly drizzling for the last half hour getting the talus all wet it would have held together better, but every foot step seemed to just push piles of wet loose talus downhill instead of propelling us uphill.  To get down the hill, Tom pretty much just plowed little rock slides down; actual walking was out of the question.

Back at the junction, we ran into the viewpoint couple again, who did manage to make it all the way to the "seat".  They told us that the view from there wasn't significantly better than from the earlier viewpoint, and in some ways it was even worse because the "bowl" you're in cuts off the view of the sides a bit.  Maybe they were just telling us that to make us feel better, but we'll take it! 😉

One final pano and a video, from the highest point where we could get an relatively unobstructed view of the lake.

Unlike most hikes, the hike back down did not take significantly less time than the hike up had, because of the steep slope and loose rocks.

We eventually made it back to the beginning of the trail, and then decided to also hike around the lake shore a bit to get photos from the other side of the of the mountains themselves.

When all was said and done, the total hike was 5.41 miles over 4:32, with 1,446 feet of elevation gain.

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We had lunch in the T42.  New on the menu today was some corned beef for Tom's sandwich, purchased from the Real Canadian Superstore as a "change of pace" from the usual turkey; it was quite tasty, and a nice change.

After lunch we drove 28 km NW back to the Visitor Centre to refill our water bottles and use the Wi-Fi.  Our gallon jug containers were fillable from the water bottle station, so we decided to use our water system's siphon feature to top off the fresh water tank, taking on just under 3 gallons.  For some reason our gray tank was already reading 1/3 full - we're not sure why.

We decided to drive (after getting gas) 90 km NW to the Kluane Lake Gravel Viewpoint (a bit to the south of Destruction Bay) for the night; it was recently reviewed as being "mosquito free" and also had some recent grizzly bear sightings.

About 14 km before our scheduled stop, we spotted a black bear on the left side of the road and pulled over to take photos of it.

While Tom was busy taking photos of the black bear on the left, Christine noticed a pair of grizzly bears off in the distance on the right - a photo taking dilemma!  The black bear was much closer and therefore more likely to be photographable.  But - grizzly bears!  Tom opted to switch to taking photos of the grizzlies for a bit.

Meanwhile, the black bear had wandered even closer in his (her?) quest for tasty flowers to munch on.

After about 7 minutes we decided to leave the bears to their business, and continued down the road.

The Kluane Lake Gravel Viewpoint ended up being one of the busiest boondocking sites we've stayed in to date, with 5 RVs already parked on the lake side and one on the road side of the parking area when we arrived.  We took the last little free parking spot on the lake side behind the last RV.

We noticed that the RV in front of us had a RV2AK26 sticker on it - the first one we've seen so far in our almost 3 weeks of travel.  The owners were sitting outside under their awning, so we went over to say "hi".  They were John and Chris, two weeks out of New York on a planned 65 day round-trip trip to Alaska.  As we were chatting, Sharon from Tennessee joined us (from one of the RVs further up in the line) for a bit.

We went down to the shore for photos before dinner.  A row of pretty purple flowers ran along the shoreline.

An arctic ground squirrel kept an eye on the proceedings from his rocky perch.

Dinner that night was reheated Instant Pot Lasagna.  After dinner, we brought out the laptops and journaled, and then Tom worked on blog #10 while Christine trip planned until bedtime around midnight.

Tomorrow we'd be starting the notoriously bad stretch of the Alaska Highway.