Mt. Allan

Last Sunday Tom & I decided to push our elevation gain by hiking Mt. Allan. Our guide book boasted this hike as having the biggest elevation gain in the Canadian Rockies with a supposed 1.7 km vertical combined with 14.4 km out & back. Our GPS pegged the hike at only 1.5 km vertical and 17.6 km hike. It was a bit of a slog to start with, the scenery not as nice as last weekend, but once we hit the sub-alpine zone the wild flowers were amazing! Still made for an excellent day.

The route:

The profile:

The trail started off on a nice wide trail, ironically called "Hidden Trail" despite it being incredibly obvious. The trees were fairly thick around the trail, blocking the wind. We were thinking we'd be running out of water before the trip was done, but thankfully once we got a bit higher out of the trees it cooled off to a perfect hiking temperature.

Unfortunately this was pretty much it for snow on this trek... just a dirty pile amongst the trees on the side of the trail.

This is the top of Mt. Olympus, a little bump really half way up to Mt. Allan.

Once we got up this ridge we got our first good view of Mt. Allan (other than from the highway). .. and this is where the hike started getting good.

Apparently this is where they do the weather measurements for the Kananaskis recreation area... There were two stations set up here, and a partial one on Mt. Allan.

... and also the top of the chair-lifts for the Nakiska ski resort.

Most of the hike was through Cretaceous conglomerates (I'm pretty sure they're equvalent to the same stuff I found dinosaur tracks in during my work field trip that I posted back on June 30). In this spot the conglomerates were all turned up on end forming this palisade wall and some of the rubble blocks had slickenslides.

From the top of Mt. Allan! Yay, victory!

Pan from the top:

There was a cement block on the very top with this survey marker:

We also found another little bit of interest up here... a small plaque stuck to a precarious rock (black rectangle on the rock to the far right of Tom).

Here's a close-up of the plaque. Tom & I thought this was a really awesome idea and hope we can have a similar memorial on our favourite hike some day (although we have to check out many more hikes so hopefully not any time soon!).

This is the view on the other side of Mt. Allan. If you want to turn this hike into a shuttle trip you can follow this trail down to the valley and head out to Hwy 1.

This is the gentle part of the ridgeline back towards the trailhead.

View of the ridge of conglomerate on the way back.

I stopped to take some pictures of the wild flowers on the way down. I don't know what they are but I think I'm inspired to head out to the bookstore to find out.