Ha Ling Peak - the Fall version

Last Sunday Tom, Breanna, and I decided to slip in a hike at Ha Ling Peak. This was the very first hike I when I moved here, but with Queen's friends Drew and Maureen in mid-July. Needless to say it's looks a bit different in autumn and the snow makes it more challenging. It's a 6.2 km loop with 819 m of elevation gain (that's what I did back in July., shown in black on the topo map.. notice I got the distances wrong there, but feel free to skip back and check out what it looks like in the summer). On this trip we only did 5.8 km and 747 m of elevation gain, shown in blue on the topo. The wind at the top was frigid - at least 10 degrees colder than hiking below the tree-line and my hands were burning so we opted to call it at that point rather than complete the summit. This time we took 3 hours to climb because of sliding on snow... I did it in 2 1/2 back in the summer... although some people were putting us to shame by running it.

Ha Ling peak from Canmore... we were pretty sure we would be hiking in snow from the outset but this confirmed it.

Yep... snow at the trailhead.

I love this shot of the mountains over the reservoir at the trailhead!

View of the valley and the snow-covered trail. It was pretty slippery... next time I'm wearing my yaks!

Aha! First sight of the top of Ha Ling!... and the end of the trees.

At this point we started getting chilled - it was the same even in July that the top was significantly colder than the hike up.

I guess the bonus of it being so windy up here is that it blows a lot of the snow off, but there was still enough on the scree to make it slippery.

Pan of the top with some extra-funny distortion: We still had to stop to take a group photo...

We didn't think the first one worked so I went back and pressed the button again... not settings were changed so I have no idea why this exposure happened, but it's kind of funny so I included it anyway.

We got feeling back in our hands part way down, and made it back to the car before it got too dark (although the sun had set behind the mountains.... totally forgot about the sun going down so much earlier since this was the first day of the time change!).

Old Baldy Ridge - Oct. 23

I got a long weekend a few weeks ago so I went hiking with a couple of friends from work. We were all of to a bit of a sluggish start so decided to go with Old Baldy Ridge. The name deceptively suggests that it's a ridge walk, but the vast majority of it is along a river through the valley. Tom had the GPS so we were on our own for navigating except for my (mostly) trusty guide book... which should have been fairly easy except the trail was completely unsigned, very rough, and covered in snow so we couldn't actually see the trail for part of it - just one set of boot prints that we followed hoping they knew where they were going. We lost the trail towards the end of the hike, but I think we made about 12 km (estimated in blue) of the 14 km trail (remainder shown in red) before we lost it completely. No GPS profile on this, but based on the topo I'm estimating we made about 720 m of the 800 m or so total.

Krista, Heather, and Breanna... not quite sure what B's finding so funny here...

The trail:

Looking back towards the highway... not sure what the name of this mountain is, but we got lovely views of it.

In many places the trail was barely wide enough to walk on (probably started off as a game trail) and covered in snow, of course increasing in snow as we meandered up the valley.

This was our point of confusion. We started up a little ridgeline with a lovely view of this little cascade, but lost the trail. We were probably supposed to keep going up it and loop around but we couldn't see any more boot prints.

We spotted some back down in the valley and up on an opposing ridge so we went back down and started up the other side. Tom would be proud that I led them scrambling up this... a very Tom-like off-trail maneouver.

The way up to Old Baldy Ridge? ... there were boot prints at least, but lost them on the scree slope above and couldn't find the trail through the forest to loop back down.

View from the ridge:

Apparently an excellent place for a photo op:

We paused there for lunch, long enough to get a good chill going then headed back down with a few more layers on... stopping for a group shot along the way. Great use of a day off!