Highway 40 -- February 22, 2009

Peter Lougheed Provincial Park is a cross-country skier's destination in winter, but us snowshoers can sneak in a trail or two as well. It's less than courteous to snowshoe in the tracks laid down for the skiers, so a few trails have been set aside for us mere snowshoers.

Sometimes even the closed and gated Highway 40 will do.

Highway is closed 6 months out of the year. While most other highways in the area re-open mid-May, we need to wait until June to access sites like Highwood Pass. When you see the amount of snow still there at the end of June you understand why the highway is closed half the year.

Looking back toward the closed highway:



Snowshoeing along the highway lets you take a good look at the scenery you zip past in the summer:



Turning onto a side road:







Amazing:



Heading back to the car:

Fenland Trail -- February 16, 2009

Fenland Trail in February. Fenland is little more than a pleasant walk, but it's a great trail for when the winter has been dragging on too long and you hope for signs of warming weather.

Spring was still a long way off, but the firm hold of winter was starting to loosen in small ways. The layers of the ice from months of varying temperatures were starting to show through...





... the trail was worn through, down to the dirt in many places....





... and finding a nice place to sit along the Bow didn't seem like such an icy proposition....

Snowshoeing in Peter Lougheed Provincial Park (RED trail) - February 8, 2009

First time snowshoeing since our guided tour in Kimberley, BC a couple of weeks prior. Path finding is so much different in snow, especially for random snowshoe trails, but it was worth it:

Rawson Lake -- January 18, 2009

Rawson Lake at the height of winter. Another one of those hikes I'd heard so much about, but never got around to doing thanks to the crowds in the summer, long drive, whatever other reasoning I could think of.

This was where Nat and I had attempted a few weeks back as we hiked along Upper Kananaskis Lake and were turned back by treacherous ice on the trail.

Hopefully in the thick of winter, there would be a lot more snow, a lot less ice.

We couldn't have been more right.

Even the day started better -- clear blue skies and a calm day, unlike our previous journey. The lake looked a lot more inviting -- even when snow-covered:



A recent frost gave everything a "fuzzy" look. Most fascinating was this lakeside bench:





The lake has long since frozen over, however, chunks of ice were pushing out of the lake. Like this beast, a lot of them had this amazing blue tinge:



Some parts never freeze over.... and the view of the Rockies was superb.





The path eventually turns away from the lake and into the forest. Neither Nat or I had ever hiked this trail before, but it seemed like not only we were getting higher.... then snow was getting that much deeper. This fallen tree was a thick, mature tree when it fell... and its trunk is still dwarfed by the snow covering it:



Only as we approached Rawson Lake did we get an idea of how deep the snow was. This fishing sign would normally stand at about chest height of the average man:



Off trail, the snow was deep, but very very loose, unlike the heavy packed snow on the trail. I stuck my poles into the snow to take a photo of the lake, only to have them sink almost all the way in:



Worth it:

Sundance Canyon -- January 10, 2009

Another beautiful hike to Sundance Canyon, this time deep in winter. Unbelievably, here in Banff the snow at the trail head wasn't deep enough to support cross-country skiing or snowshoeing, but it was just enough for a pleasant winter hike.





Closer to the canyon itself, these low bushes with the leaves still attached made for a contrast with the rest of the forest floor:



The snow was a little deeper at the canyon mouth, nice for the cross-country skiers who made the trek. I liked the look of this single track to the lonely, snow-covered picnic table...



So perfect you'd almost think the snow was photoshopped! It's strange that the only place I see any reference to miles is on old Park signs (which look so much nicer than the metal ones).



Mouth of the canyon... you can see the water swamped up around the trees on the right side of the photo, then promptly froze around the trunks...



A look up the canyon to the viewpoint/bridge..



A couple of trees had small ice crystal frozen to them, they were scattered all over the trees like nature's little decorations. This close-up didn't turn out like I'd hoped, but it's still cool to look at:



A little colour in the forest beyond the usual green and white!

Chester Lake -- November 29, 2008

Sometimes the overcast days are more interesting than the blue sky days. This holds especially true in winter, when the clouds meld with the snow and anything with colour or light stands out that much more.

Chester Lake, as I've mentioned before, is renowned for deep snow early in the season. In late November, when parts of the mountains were still waiting for the first real accumulation, Chester Lake trail looked as though it had seen a season's worth of snow:



Approaching the "valley":



The "valley" never ceases to amaze me:





Panorama supplied by my amazing husband:



All that snow, gently curved by the hills beneath and the wind above often looks like an ocean to me, with gently rolling waves. The clouds and sun were amazing this day:



Though the trail was nearly deserted the day we ventured out, on our way out we had a reminder we weren't alone in the forest. Some hard working critter had littered the trail with pines for later storing:



These are the winter hikes that make me forget summer....

Kananaskis -- November 22, 2008

Despite living in the shadow of the Canadian Rockies, I can honestly say there are very few days when the hiking conditions are dramatically cold. Even hiking in -20 C weather isn't a huge deal when you're bundled up and moving fast. Tracking through deep snow will burn a lot of calories and the next thing you know, you're peeling the layers off.

The wind is another story, but the odds are pretty good that if the wind and snow are blowing around at -25C, you're not even going to be able to traverse the mountain (or city!) highways to get to the trailhead, let alone hike through it.

This day in late November was a rare occurrence of bitter cold, a strong wind, but next to no snow. Nat and I thought we'd take a gentle hike along Upper Kananaskis Lake, turn off to Rawson Lake, and hopefully stay out of the wind.

We questioned the decision as soon as we stepped out of the car. The snow looks sparse here... that's because the raging wind off the lake had blown it all away from the shore:



This grass didn't grow this way... it's bent over from the force of the wind off the lake:



The wind was also chopping up the waters of the usually calm lake. While it was a little more sheltered here, this wind from the lake caused us more grief on the trail, as the water was blown onto the trail and froze. The result was about half a foot of ice with zero traction. We opted to turn around.



We headed over to the Boulton Creek Trading Post -- a restaurant and convenience store usually busting with activity during the summer camping season. Today it seemed deserted in an apocalyptic sort of way. We found an old ranger cabin, where Nat broke out the chicken soup packed especially for this cold day:



Not sure of the history of this building, still trying to find out. I wandered around while Nat readied the sustenance. You can see the snow was starting to fall:



"Kananaskis Lakes Patrol Cabin" (digitally enhanced to bring out the lettering).



Another structure about 100 feet behind the first. No indication at all what this was for:



Notice the constant photos of the food? And have you seen a better spread while hiking? Nat's awesome.



It was an aborted hiking trip, but a good one. The snow and wind increased, so we got out of there before the roads were impacted. Amazingly, once out of the Rockies, the weather took a major turn for the better. It turned out to be a Chinook, a weather phenomenon we live for during the winter in the Alberta Foothills.

From Wikipedia:

The reference to a wind or weather system, simply "a Chinook", originally meaning a warming wind from the ocean into the interior regions of the Pacific Northwest (the Chinook people lived near the ocean, along the lower Columbia River). A strong Chinook can make snow one foot deep almost vanish in one day. The snow partly melts and partly evaporates in the dry wind. Chinook winds have been observed to raise winter temperature, often from below −20°C (−4°F) to as high as 10°C to 20°C (50°F to 68°F) for a few hours or days, then temperatures plummet to their base levels. The greatest recorded temperature change in 24 hours was caused by Chinook winds on January 15, 1972, in Loma, Montana; the temperature rose from -48°C (-56°F) to 9°C (49°F).

The Wikipedia article is excellent -- even I didn't know Chinook winds in Southern Alberta have caused trains to derail and empty semis to topple, but nonetheless, you can understand why we all celebrate when a Chinook is forecast in January.

That explains the wind in the mountains that day.

There's no mistaking a Chinook as it moves in. The arch is very distinctive in the sky:






A very welcome sight in the dead of winter!!