Guinn's Pass and Galatea Lakes

Tom, Breanna, and I decided to hike Guinn's Pass last weekend and ended tacking on Galatea Lakes as well. It was a 19.4 km round-trip, with a maximum elevation gain of 870 m (although over 1km if you count all the ups and downs). The day started off kind of cool, but was comfortable for most of the day... really until the last hour when we were hiking back when we got poured on. This trail is particularly known for the amazing wildflowers!

We started from the Galatea parking lot where there was a fantastic view of Mt. Kidd (featured in a previous post). Unfortunately it was also a super hazy day so many of the scenery shots ended up a bit washed looking.

The trail started off with this lovely suspension bridge, and I think there were 8 bridges in total of varying types.

Just a few shots of the river... the trail wound back and forth across the creek providing ample scenic river shots and bridge photos.

The trail was beautiful and relaxing too! It was a fairly comfortable hike over a soft forested trail, pleasantly shaded, and very peaceful...

Relaxing on one of the bridges:

Another bridge... losing count at this point:

Heading out of the trees...

Okay... so the flower pics begin again. This time the botany lesson is scattered throughout the post... and Breanna threatened to start calling me "Botany Becky" after the numerous stops to photograph them. This one is an Orange Agoseris. It was pretty neat seeing the progression of flower types. The lower slopes were dominated by red, purple, and white, moving upward progressed to yellow, blue and white, and then at the top only light yellow and white.

I think this one is a Tall Jacob's Ladder.

This one was harder to track down... I've noticed it on previous hikes but without the berries so I didn't clue in to look in the shrub section It's a Bracted Honeysuckle, otherwise known as Black Twinberry. Don't eat this one - considered somewhat poisonous and apparently tastes so bad that nobody would really want to eat it anyway.

Yellow Columbine: This lovely one is Low Larkspur (aka Delphinium)

The scree trail leading up Guinn's pass (the trail actually zig-zags only part way up and then exits towards the left of the shot).

I was kind of wondering over these plants for a while. They looked a bit funny with the "fruit" being attached to the leaves...

Tom threw a bit of enlightenment on the matter by breaking it apart and revealing a parasitic worm inside.. kind of neat though.

Many of the rocks on the slope had some fantastic dune trough cross-stratification (for all you geo-geeks):

This one was pretty neat - a pretty purple with yellow-tipped stamens. It's a Silky Scorpionweed, aka Silky Phacelia.

Don't know what this is... maybe if I could have seen it earlier in the flowering season, but it looked neat:

The scree slides were pretty neat looking along the trail to Guinn's Pass: A view up Guinn's Pass: A view down Guinn's pass: Red-Osier Dogwood: I think this is a type of Parnassia. These two are pretty common... Purple Aster and Red Paintbrush.

Panorama from the top of Guinn's Pass. The view was amazing!! I'll definitely do this one again, but maybe hike over Guinn's Pass, overnight in Ribbon Creek, and then hike out through Kananaskis Village and back along Terrace Trail. This one is highly recommended!

It was a bit chilly on top so Breanna and I bundled on some layers (you know this one was going to show up B!).

We came across this little guy on our way out. He was popping in and out like a whack-a-mole, but I managed to catch this shot of him anyway.

Heading back out:

We were making pretty good time so we decided to swing up the other fork of the trail to Lillian Lake (only an additional 0.9km).

Then from there we figured we might as well tack on the extra hour to make a quick round-trip to Galatea Lakes at the far end of the trail (although if we hadn't done this we would have got back to the car just before the rain hit rather than hiking in it). This is the trail up to Galatea Lake: A hazy view of us at Galatea Lake and a panorama of it:

No photos of the way out... it was raining too hard and we were all getting hungry so we booted it out pretty quickly... awesome day as usual though! Any day in the mountains is a good day!