We climbed Mt. Lady Macdonald on Saturday (recommended as a moderate-level shoulder-season hike in our guidebook). The trailhead is right in Canmore, starting at a paved path along Cougar Creek at an elevation of 1383 m.
The hike to the shoulder of the mountain is 6.6 km roundtrip with a total elevation gain of 917 m, or if you go to the top of the summit it's 7.6 km round-trip with 1117 m of elevation gain (top of the mountain is 2500m). The trail rose steadily but wasn't too challenging. The parks web-site said there was snow on the trail so we came prepared with lots of layers - but the weather was unseasonably warm and instead of layering up we were wishing we had shorts and ended up with pretty stuffed packs! The very top of the peak was a bit cool, but still made for a beautiful day of hiking.
A nice perk to this hike is getting to see some more ruined buildings at the top - not quite as nice or as old as the fire look-out on Mt. Burke, but I'm definitely liking the additional points of interest... I guess at some point someone had the brilliant idea of building a teahouse on Mt. Lady Macdonald and then flying tourists up by helicopter - I have no idea how that would have been economically feasible, but the residents of Canmore vetoed it (not before parts of it were built though!). I'm glad that this one is merely a relict now and not a tourist trap!
View of the teahouse:
View of the helicopter landing platform and the summit of Mt. Lady Macdonald.
A little pagoda near the edge of a cliff below the teahouse. It was the perfect spot for lunch and a nap in the sun. This was the only spot where we saw snow, and that was restricted to the areas shaded by trees - but this hike is steep and south-facing so it tends to be fairly free of snow this time of year...
View of the mountains across the valley - lots of snow on the north-facing peaks!
View of the platform (whitish square to the right), teahouse (whitish blob just above and to the left of the platform) and pagoda (whitish dot to the left of these buildings on the edge of the cliff) from near the top of Mt. Lady Macdonald. This part of the trail was a bit more challenging. There was no real defined trail other than where people had come sliding down the scree on the descent. The scree was pretty loose and for every two steps you took you slid down one.
Kali-roo with Mt. Lady Macdonald summit in the background.
We hung out at the bottom of the scree slope for a while, just enjoyinging the sun on our faces...
It was a really pleasant day that I didn't want to end, but eventually we decided we should head back down before it got dark and find some dinner. The sun was sinking behind the crest of the mountains as we wandered into the parking lot...
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