The meadows out behind Sunshine Village ski resort, full of wild flowers later on in the season. Currently not many flowers, but plenty of ground squirrels.
(The larches are beginning to regrow their spiky things that aren’t leaves)
A casual stroll from lake to lake, out on Highway 93 (south of Castle Junction). It was a warm day, but there were still a few piles of snow around as we got higher up, and Arnica Lake itself still had ice on it.
After a week of being miserably sick, I got over-excited and decided to head up Ha Ling again after work. The trail is nice and clear now, but I’m finding it harder and harder to get enough oxygen when I’m heading uphill (all of a sudden my stomach has expanded up to the bottom of my ribcage, and my lungs have their work cut out for them providing enough air for two of us – 31.5 weeks along, so around seven months down, two to go).
So it wasn’t record-breaking, but still a nice hike. Fifteen other people on the trail, and one cheeky squirrel that ran to the end of his tree to get a better look at me.
My main question with West Wind Pass is this: did they only tack the “West” part on the front of the name because they thought it would cause too much ribald snickering otherwise?
Being a lovely warm sunny weekend, half of Calgary was in Canmore, as a result we decided to go slightly further afield for the afternoon – to West Wind Pass, a short and relatively gentle hike out in K-Country.
Yes, I’m doing a lot of hiking these days. Mountain biking is out at the moment, and I’ve been doing some climbing in my fancy full body harness, just not outdoors yet (because my hands and I have an agreement about not going near cold rock… this weekend is looking promising though). And the snow has all gone (well, not really, there’s still plenty around if you’re super keen … that does not describe me at the moment). So in the meantime, I hike.
Most of the time we were in the trees. I do not have any photos of this, as it was one of those “trees trees and more trees” kind of times, and a very steep trail. I’ve hiked Grotto before, but had forgotten just how much steeper it is than the other trails on the main Canmore mountains. The main Canmore mountains being Ha Ling, EEOR (East End Of Rundle), Lady Mac and Grotto, according to this chart I just invented.
Surprisingly enough, getting more pregnant isn’t helping my hiking speed – perhaps I need an oxygen tank and some sherpas. It was also a really warm day. Well, it was 15oC or so, maybe a little more, but it felt really warm being baked by the alpine sun on the side of a steep mountain.
But after hours of never-ending hiking up the steep trail through the trees, we eventually hit the tree-line. It was amazing and oh-so-exciting. Except then the people who’d never been up Grotto before were asking us “Is that the top just there?”. And we had to reply “No, that’s not the top, see all the way over there along the ridge? That is the top”. And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Once you leave the tree line it’s not far at all to the false summit though, and progress feels a lot more substantial compared to the never-ending trees below. Also, it was a gorgeous day, which didn’t hurt.
Reaching the false summit, we decided not to head all the way along the ridge-line to the summit proper. Half of us had been there before, one quarter of us really wasn’t fussed, and the remaining quarter wasn’t sufficiently enthused to go and do it on his own.
All that remained then was the eternal infernal trek back down the mountain, which brought a few animal sightings (chipmunk? squirrel? wacky grouse birds?) and hardly any bear maulings.