The morning grizzly wanders through Banff’s Central Park, just after 8am (he didn’t eat me).
(For reference, that’s about three or four hundred metres from my work, I sometimes wander down there to eat lunch in the sun)
It’s that time of the week again, that time honoured tradition of a hike up Ha Ling Peak. Trail conditions are getting faster too, with a bare (albeit slightly muddy) trail until 2/3 of the way up, followed by a series of slushy snow patches.
(Sixth ascent for 2010)
After a prolonged discussion with a charming young man from Parks Canada, I finally managed to convince him to let me book into the Egypt Lake shelter (despite the fact that the snow would be bad, and I couldn’t know what the conditions were like despite having got info from someone who’d toured there recently, and I was going to be crossing avalanche paths despite the fact I wasn’t actually going that way, and I was going to be eaten by bears, and blah blah blah I know they must deal with a lot of idiots, but he honestly didn’t listen to a word I was saying).
So we set off towards Healy Pass from the top of Wa Wa lift at Sunshine – taking the easy way in, because we’re lazy like that. And the snow was lovely! Especially in the trees as we dropped down closer to Healy Pass. Closer to the pass was a different matter, as everything got all sun-crusted and manky. It wasn’t warming enough to create good corn snow, instead it was just breakable crust and thoroughly unpleasant. Thankfully we weren’t skiing down it yet, and the far side of the pass towards Egypt Lake wasn’t quite so bad.
Downhill through gentle trees all the way to the hut, as the mountains behind it loomed larger and larger, then finally across the bridge over the creek, and collapse. Thanks to the scare campaign run by Parks, no-one else had booked in and we had the place to ourselves (or maybe everyone else has moved onto climbing and biking, it is Spring after all).
Being a terribly basic ‘shelter’, the hut doesn’t have cake tins, stoves and sinks. So it’s pretty much like an Australian hut, except with more room. We got the wood fire going, and spent the rest of the day eating.
Having fallen asleep not long after 9pm there wasn’t too much of a sleep-in, but Sunday dawned looking brilliant, with blue skies and a fresh snow coating over everything. And so we skiied out.
We decided to go out via Healy Creek, hoping the snow coverage wasn’t too bad. In the end it was ski-able all the way back to Sunshine, although we ended up on a narrow strip of snow bounded by dirt by the last kilometre. Most of the way down we were following a set of animal prints walking along the trail in front of us, identified afterward as a small black bear (we weren’t sure at the time, they were just so small, but a bear is the only animal that matches the toe/pad configuration).
The sun is hanging out for long enough now that it’s not too hard to fit in a Ha Ling Peak hike after work – although a run of cold weather and some precipitation means that everything is pretty snow covered. But no evil ice patches! Also no bears. Just the usual hoards of chattering squirrels, and some crazy cloud action.
(5th Ha Ling ascent for 2010… it feels like more somehow)
Gap Lake is out along the 1A from Canmore, towards Calgary. As far as bike rides in the Rocky Mountains go, it’s not super-scenic. Sure, there are pretty mountains hanging out in the background, but you’re cycling past cement factories, and swampy looking areas, and concrete things dumped next to the trainline. There were no dead bodies or shopping trolleys though, so I guess it’s better than Melbourne. And there was a herd of mountain sheep – although they were between coats, so didn’t really count as adding much to the scenery, as they looked as if they were about to die of sheep-leprosy.
