Little Arethusa

Once again I'm behind in the postings. Tom came home the same day the folks left back in mid-Sept, then I left for a 2 day work field trip, but when I got back home we decided to make an attempt at Little Arethusa Cirque/peak since I did Ptarmigan Cirque (located just up the road from Little Arethusa) with the folks. It was a bit of an aggravating start to the day, we got started a little late, but mostly it was because I apparently did not read the directions very well so we had three starts. On the way to the trailhead we saw these mountain sheep hanging out and licking the road... maybe they were from the same herd I saw with the folks at Ptarmigan Cirque.... The sign for Little Arethusa is right next to the Ptarmigan Cirque parking lot so I assumed (and therefore erroneously read the instructions) that we started from there. We began by following an obvious trail, but one trail that ended up being a rugged portion of Ptarmigan Cirque that I didn't do with the folks...

Once we realized we were heading in the total opposite direction of where we wanted to go (maybe 20 min of hiking) we back-tracked... saw this moose on the way out.

I checked the directions from the parking lot (but didn't check at that point we had the right parking lot!) and we headed off from the southern point. Fortunately we had our GPS with us, thinking we might snag a cache, and realized we actually wanted to be on the other side of the road. At this point I read the directions more carefully, realized the appropriate parking spot was actually a couple of km further down the highway (d'oh!) and we hopped in the car and headed to the right spot.

We finally headed out on the right trail and fairly quickly entered into Little Arethusa Cirque and had a snack next to the talus and a very pleasant little stream.

From there we made the executive decision to keep going even though it meant that I wouldn't make it back to Calgary in time to curl... it was a gorgeous day and it was worth it!

Heading up from the cirque involved a bit of trail finding, but Tom's quite good at that so we didn't have too many problems from this point on...

View down to the cirque: Looking up to the top of Little Arethusa:

The "route" to the top was pretty rubbly and Kali wasn't comfortable with the full ascent so we chilled out on the side of the mountain enjoying the view (we got fairly close to the top) before heading back down.

On the way out we thought about grabbing one of the many geocaches near this spot... dumping tbe "unnecessary bush-whacking" geocoin that I was sure was jinxing our trip, but we didn't have any luck finding the cache near this creek quickly... and we didn't feel like spending much time on it at this point.

Anyway... gorgeous, fun day in the end... and learned an important lesson on reading directions!