Home»Outdoor Adventures»Kananaskis Country AB»Tryst Lake 2014

Tryst Lake
Peter Lougheed Provincial Park & Spray Valley Provincial Park, Kananaskis Country
July 12, 2014

In July we drove down to Canmore to visit Uncle Bruce and spend some time in the mountains around Canmore. This was the first time that James visited Canmore, and we wanted to take him on a nice hike to show him how fun that is!

Andrew came out from Calgary and met us in Canmore, and then we drove south along the Spray Lakes Road to the trailhead. It's located about 40 kilometres south of Canmore on the Mount Shark Road, just west of the Spray Lakes Road. The trail follows an old road along the west side of the Smuts Creek valley at the base of Tent Ridge for about 1.5 kilometres before turning west and gaining elevation up to Tryst Lake in a nice cirque below The Fist and Tent Ridge. The hike is relatively easy with the exception of a couple complicated sections through an avalanche path where deadfall was strewn across the trail, and another particularly steep section that's eroding away. We took our time and arrived at the lake in about 1.5 hours.

There are a couple options for extending the hike further from the lake. The most common extension is to scramble up the ridge on the south to gain aerial views of Tryst Lake and the Smuts Creek valley. Another option is to make a loop around the lake. We hung out at the lake for a while before turning around and descending the way we came.

Trip Length: 7.5km
Cumulative Ascent/Descent: 300m