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!).