Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Canmore Triple Crown

Within a month of moving to Calgary, I had already heard about the Canmore Triple Crown, but it took 3 years of living here to finally do it. If you haven't heard of the Triple Crown, it requires the completion of 3 popular hikes around Canmore in a day (Ha Ling, East End of Rundle aka EEOR and Lady MacDonald). It sounded achievable but grueling and despite tossing the idea around many brainstorm sessions, there was always something more appealing on the table and thus it never budged from its place low on ever growing list of weekend activities. A bad weather forecast was shutting us down from our original weekend trip and I threw out the idea of going for the Triple Crown, since you can scramble in any weather. To my surprise, it was met with enthusiasm so we got an early night on Friday in anticipation of a big day of hiking.
Views of misty mountains from Lady Mac

Sunday, June 12, 2016

The Weekend Where We Lost All Our Stuff - The Fold Mt Kidd and The North Ridge of Wasootch Tower

Gripped Magazine recently published a list of 4 moderate alpine climbs off of Kananaskis Highway. Included in that list was Joy, a great climb we did a few years ago. Based on that, and the raving reviews on the route description, we decided that the Fold on Mt Kidd (11 pitches, 5.8 trad) would be a great day out. We got off to a slow start after having to register for our campsite and relocate the trailer at the crack of 9 when the campers centre opened. Our next obstacle was the fact that the Galeta Trailhead Parking was closed for the spring. We checked the map and saw that were weren't going to be on any closed trails during our approach, but we still had to park on the highway as the gate was closed. It was a long, steep approach but followed a well worn trail and the route itself was very obvious even from the highway. Unfortunately it just wasn's our day. Maybe Gripped hyped the climb up too much or maybe we just didn't do the route properly, but I found this route to be much more of an adventure than I was hoping for! 
Looking up at Mt Kidd and the Fold