Albertan ski girl
Angel Diva
While Banff and Lake Louise get all the attention here in the Canadian Rockies, our favourite summer place to retreat to is the mountains just south of the big national parks, in an amazing area called Kananaskis Country. K-Country has many provincial parks and almost none of the crowds that the parks do in the summer. A new graduate student of mine arrived from Italy last week, so my darling SO, 2 friends of ours and I decided to take him to the mountains for a short hike. We decided to go to Ptarmigan cirque, a lovely glacial cirque in Peter Lougheed Provincial Park to do a relatively easy hike to the cirque and then a short scramble up the back of the cirque, between Mts. Rae and Arethusa. The weather was amazing, and the views incredible! Because you start from a high pass, most of the hike is in the alpine. It only takes about 200 m in elevation before you break through the treeline, and then it's glorious views in all directions for the rest of the hike and scramble.
This is from the beginning of the hike - we started by the road, which is right next to the long horizontal light green stripe in the middle/right of the photo.
The views start to open up once the trees begin to thin!
Here we've gotten up to the meadows and have begun our hike towards the back of the cirque. Me and SO on the left, our friends on the right.
We arrive at the beautiful waterfall in the back of the cirque. We eventually scrambled up to the top of the waterfalls and a headed towards the saddle in the middle of the photo.
SO and my grad student enjoying the view from the scree fields above the waterfalls.
A panorama of the cirque on our way out.
This is from the beginning of the hike - we started by the road, which is right next to the long horizontal light green stripe in the middle/right of the photo.
The views start to open up once the trees begin to thin!
Here we've gotten up to the meadows and have begun our hike towards the back of the cirque. Me and SO on the left, our friends on the right.
We arrive at the beautiful waterfall in the back of the cirque. We eventually scrambled up to the top of the waterfalls and a headed towards the saddle in the middle of the photo.
SO and my grad student enjoying the view from the scree fields above the waterfalls.
A panorama of the cirque on our way out.
