Tag: hiking

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canada hiking trip reports

almost entirely unlike the edge of a knife

Mount Lady Macdonald – with an altitude of 2,606 m (8,550 ft) gives a 1200 metre elevation gain hiking from town. It was named in 1886 after Susan Agnes Macdonald, wife of Sir John A. Macdonald, the first Prime Minister of Canada (this is what wikipedia claims anyway, but there are all sorts of made-up things slipping in there these days, we all know Canada doesn’t even have a Prime Minister).

A typical 9 o’clock start had us leaving the house around 10 (we being Siggs and I, not Alex, who is stuck doing 14+ hour days at work this weekend), and walking towards Lady Mac – along a cunning short cut that actually forced us to walk uphill, and then ended up being tantalisingly close to the path we wanted, without actually reaching it. So we had to walk downhill again.

With the sore legs of people who had spent yesterday doing silly things (a 60km bike ride and hiking up Cascade mountain respectively), we hit auto-pilot on the way up, and told our legs to shut up and just keep walking.

 

Looking up Mount Lady Mac from the abandoned teahouse

 

We reached the teahouse and begun some heavy duty snacking. You could probably have even called it lunch, but for the fact we had a second one a few hours later. And the teahouse isn’t so much a teahouse as an unfinished wooden construction with lots of burn marks from where teenagers with no self-preservation have been lighting fires ON the teahouse using wood FROM the teahouse. It does provide a nice viewing and lunching platform though.

 

 

Following the teahouse there was a thankfully short slog up a scree slope until we reached the *dramatic chords* KNIFE-EDGE RIDGE. This was where I left Siggs, who has far too much common sense to be ignoring the fact she’s on a very skinny bit of rock with a definite cliff on one side, and a very steep slide on the other. There was only a light breeze, so the scramble across was actually really fun – there’s no technical difficulty to it, just the difficulty of ignoring your brain going ARGH, MY GOD IT’S A CLIFF, WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE! Thanks to climbing I’m accustomed to my brain’s panicked warnings of impending doom. Although I didn’t stop to get my camera out along the way – I’m coordinated when it comes to not dropping me off a cliff, I have a bad track record when it comes to cameras and cliffs however.

 

Looking back along the ridge from the summit (this photo doesn’t really do justice to the steepness either, it’s really quite narrow at the top, though you can spend a lot of the time with your hands on the top of the ridge, walking your feet along holds on the slopey non-cliff side)

 

So I hit the summit – finally, that ridge seemed to go forever. Maybe it’s about 150 metres? I had Siggs at the start of it as a reference point, and she was certainly a distant blob. The journey back was quicker and easier, as I spent much less time going “Am I at the summit now? Nope, this isn’t it, maybe it’s that next bit.”

 

 

We sat at the top of the scree slope and looked down at the teahouse, helicopter pad, and Canmore while enjoying a second lunch. Followed by interminable plodding back down a path that seemed a lot less steep than it had done on the way up, and gradual removal of layers as we hit the warm valley air.

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bikes canada general hiking trip reports

on the rise

We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming with an exhilarating account of Megan’s ascent of Ha Ling Peak.

 

Bike rests at the pass (note water crackers in drink bottle holder)
 

The cycle from home, through town, and up the hill to the pass between Mt Lawrence Grassi and Mt Rundle went something like this:

 


(click to embiggen)
 

Then the bike was hidden in the trees, and bike shoes were switched for Chaco sandals. And the hike went something like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

The summit of Ha Ling is at 2407 metres (7897ft), so an elevation gain of 700 metres for the hike, or 1.1km if you count it all the way from cycling through town. Basically, it was high enough for the intermittent rain to turn up as snow just as I arrived at the summit (while I was quite warm in shorts and a t-shirt down in the valley).

 

 

After some summit photos and snacks, I trotted back down the hill again, singing along to the songs in my newly created adventuring soundtrack…

I’m burning through the skies Yeah!
Two hundred degrees
That’s why they call me Mister Fahrenheit
I’m trav’ling at the speed of light
I wanna make a supersonic man of you

(Queen are fun – although I’m not sure how much sense some of the lyrics make, particularly that one about a racing car passing by like Lady Godiva).

Back down from the hiking, I collect my bike and just after taking this photo, realise my wallet is not in my pack. This was nearly the sad tale of a wallet lost somewhere on the wilds of Ha Ling Peak, but instead is the feel-good story of a lost wallet found by someone and handed in to a passing Park Ranger, who in turn got the wallet back to its owner.

 

 

Thanks for that Tom. After the weather, we’ll be coming back to you with more hard hitting news from the Yukon.

Categories
canada general trip reports

grotto mountain

I started off on this hike with the vague idea that it would only take a couple of hours. I mean, the mountain’s just there! In my backyard! Surely it shouldn’t take too long to walk to the top. As I stumbled out the front door, I noticed snow on all of the surrounding mountains – ooohhh, that’s right, it was raining last night, I guess it must have been colder than I realised – curse this ‘Summer’ of the Canadian Rockies. And then I could have turned around and picked up my gaiters, but it seemed warm, surely it wouldn’t be too bad. Perhaps the snow would melt before we got there.

Meandering across from home and through the Benchland trails, we eventually hit the northwest spur of Grotto Mountain and started the hike up. The trail was obvious, and kept zig-zagging up the spur until we reached this white lurking presence which hung in the trees, and covered the ground making it all slippery and wet. With a bit more backsliding we wandered on up to the edge of the scree slope and on towards the false summit. Ahhh, snow covered scree, my favourite thing. Wind-blown snow covered scree is even better.

 

Canmore and its many mountains
 

Hitting the ridge the wind picked up, which didn’t make our snow-soaked shoes and pants feel any warmer. As we crossed the kilometre of ridgeline between the false summit and actual summit, the wind veered between ‘chilly breeze’ and ‘oxygen-stealing force of doom’. Following the ridge along, I tried to pick the line of least snow (and avoid being blown off). Summit – quickly take photos then retreat. Must escape wind. Cold wind. Views! But wind too cold. Descend, shelter from wind, devour sugar, drink water.

 

Brrrr
 

As we hit the treeline my brain started to function again. The snowline had crept a long way up the mountain since we’d started out this morning, and as we dropped further into the valley the wind died away and the temperature slowly crept up, until eventually I was warm.

It was about then that we came across these odd birds… the female Dusky Grouse (no, I didn’t know what it was at the time, I had to ask the internet afterwards) was herding about her flock of three chicks, and looking at us suspiciously, while her male friend sat in a tree nearby, before jumping out to parade past us.

 

Female Dusky Grouse
 

Male Dusky Grouse
 

On arrival home I discovered that the summit is at 2706 metres (8878ft) – so an altitude gain of 1300 metres or so. That could be why it took a while.

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general

the internet is a terrible place

I started off just planning to have a look for any descriptions of the Milford Track, or the Routeburn, or one of those other tracks in New Zealand that are so well known – just to get an idea what they’re each like, how long they are, and how busy they are. Then I turned up a National Geographic list of the Best! Hikes! Ever! And then I started reading about the Kungsladen in the far north of Sweden…

“In the extreme north of Sweden, a hundred miles (160 kilometers) inside the Arctic Circle, hides the last remote wilderness in Western Europe. This is Lapland, and through it runs Kungsleden, the “King of Trails,” a 275-mile (443-kilometer) route through an expansive landscape of birch forests, hidden glaciers, powerful rivers, and the highest mountains in Sweden. The sheer scale of the Kungsleden hits home when, at the end of a 16-mile (26-kilometer) day, you realize you’ve only traversed half of the undulating, glacier-carved valley that you dropped into that morning.”

And started thinking – well, that would be fun to do. And then someone mentioned the Cirque of the Unclimbables, in Canada’s Northwest Territories, with the unforgettable Lotus Flower Tower route, and I spend half an hour staring at photos and route descriptions and trip reports, pondering how I could afford to pay for a share of the charter plane to get there.

And then someone links me to the blog Up In Alaska, and I sit there reading and reading and thinking “Wow, snow biking in Alaska! That sounds like lots of fun! I should start biking in the snow more often. Maybe I can do it when it gets cold and I can’t get distracted by all these other activities there are to do in the Rockies in Summer (hiking, climbing and that sort of thing). And I could get a Pugsley! And have a fat wheel bike! I’ll fit in in somewhere between all the telemarking I want to do, and backcountry touring, and ice climbing…. So many things to do, and places to go (and the luxury to be able to choose to do the things that fascinate you – provided you can actually find the money).

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canada general

banff

Banff is a little town in the Banff National Park.

The stats
Banff NP was Canada’s first National Park, and as one of the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks, it’s also a World Heritage Site. At an altitude of 1,463 m Banff is the highest town in Canada. Any further growth from its current population of seven or eight thousand (depending on the season) has been restricted due to environmental concerns – the National Park is one of the most visited in North America. The Canada Census of 2006 gave the median age in the town as 29.6, thanks in no small part to the huge number of 18-30 year old internationals over here on working holiday visas (apparently Banff can be quite popular with the 18 year old crowd, as being in the province of Alberta the legal drinking age is 18 – versus 19 for British Columbia).

The view

 
On my first day in Banff we hiked up the Sanson Peak of Sulphur Mountain, one of the scenic mountains that are conveniently scattered around the town. At 2256 metres it towers above Australia’s highest mountain, Mount Kosciuszko (2228 m). And the photo above shows the view from the peak. Looking down into the Bow Valley, you can see the township of Banff nestled next to Tunnel Mountain, and the Bow River winding along next to it.