Hike to Bow Hut

I and The Hope eventually got a chance to do a hike together due to be out of work, both of us! He's OK because the amount of money he makes is way more than a regular salary. I'm not so much but we had been wanting to do that in the past 4 months or so and finally did it. The goal was to reach a little lake in Icefield Parkway area, near Bow Lake, called Iceberg Lake although there's not much information available about it and if you put it in a search engine, you would see the result of a similar lake in Glacier National Park in Montana. Nevertheless we set up everything and he was supposed to pick me up at one of the LRT stations at 07:00 and he showed up almost 10 min. late. I normally like to start very early but didn't want to force him on the first trip together. Then after a few kilometers drive his car sent a signal to the front panel indicating that it just switched to reserve fuel thank indicating the gasoline level was low. So we had to pull into the Husky gas station in Dead Man's Flat and purchase fuel. Then there were a few construction spots and seep limits. Finally when we got to Castle Mountain Junction we took the wrong exit and all these delays causes us to reach the trail-head more than 45 minutes later than what we had planned and start our hike at 09:55 instead of 09:00! 

My downloaded information was not bad but we took the wrong trail 2 times and one of them wasted at least 20 minutes of our time. The trail was quiet as it was a weekday but there were two or three couples with their kids who were heading to Bow Hut. 

Bow Glacier taken from the bowl. Bow Hut would be on the right after an easy ascent

We stopped many times for photos and maybe once of twice to reduce or increase the layers until we finally reached the bowl below Bow Glacier. From there we hiked up and reached ourselves to the hut. We took a break at the hut for maybe 15 minute and headed up to see if we were able to get ourselves to the lake. It was cold and wind was blowing. The Hope suggested to stop right below where the final ascent to the lake would have started and stated that it was too cold and too late to carry on the hike to the lake. In addition to that we were not well-equipped. I lent him my anti-slip soles and made him able to get up that far but the snow was deep and he didn't want to go further up. We spent as many as 20 minutes and then headed down back to the car. The descent was long and tiring and when we reached Bow Lake where we had parked in the morning, it was almost dark. It was not a very challenging hike but losing the way, deep snow and frequent stops for photography made us very tired. We didn't reach out goal but it was OK. We gained good elevation and walked good hours. 

(Photo, top: Bow Lake from a few meters above Bow Hut)