Hi all. I was at Mt. Assiniboine Lodge, where the internet is so slow that trying to post was too frustrating! But the hiking was great, and we saw a small adult grizzly digging glacier lily tubers. She looked at us, and then went on eating. I'm now at a cabin 20 minutes north of Banff and will be hiking again starting tomorrow. I'll try to post some pictures, but first I need to sort through them. I hope the internet here is better. No cougers, of either variety, yet. But the views have been breathtaking!
P.S. The wind forces the air to rise up the windward side of the mountain, causing the moisture to condense, and forming a cloud tail off the peak. This tail changes constantly.
At last, we get to see what's at the end of the trail. Can we look forward to many more pictures like these when you're home again?
Looks like it smells great. Some shots earthy and dense others cool, crisp and clean. No grand trip for me this year so I'll indulge virtually in yours. What's that green pool in that pic? Appears to a collection of water run off but the shape is rather odd for that, especially seeing as how the water should/would be flowing.
I don't remember the name of the lake in the last set of pictures. There is a runoff stream, but the trees hide it in the picture. But there was a lake with no visible outflow. The guidebook said it drains off underground. If it makes folks feel any better, you generally have to climb a couple of thousand feet to get to these places. One day we walked 24 km and climbed 3,800 feet. The next day we walked 14 km and climbed 4,200 feet. More often we walk around 15 to 18 km and climb around 3,000 feet. I'm very slow, but I'm steady and don't need to stop to rest. It's all in the pacing. The last place I'll be hiking, for 3 weeks, next month, half the trails begin with a thousand foot drop, so you end the day with a thousand foot climb, very steep. I love it, but I go VERRRRY slow. I'll be putting together a CD off all my season's pictures at full res. I get frustrated loading so many onto a web site, and some sites have a size limit. But I'll be sending the CD to friends, and if someone has an easy way to get them onto a web site maybe it can be done. Or if there's a way Danny can set up an album from a CD I'd be happy to mail him one. But PriusChat has a small maximum picture size, so I can only post the ones I take at low res for posting, or a very few I reduce when I get home, a tedious process for me.
Daniel, do you remember the name of the mountain in your last picture? It looks a bit like the back side of Castle Mountain, but I couldn't see enough of the peaks to tell. There are some amazing views to be had in this area without even leaving the highway, but the truly spectacular vistas are worth several days of hiking. My turn will come in August.
I'm home now, for two days. The internet service where I was the last week and a half was dreadful. Sometimes I could connect, sometimes I could not. Frequently it just cut me off. And it was so slow that PC was taking several minutes to load! Thus the poor responses and few pictures. I'll make up for that by posting a bunch now. Yes, that was Castle Mountain in the picture. Saturday we had an intense hike to Bourgeau Lake and then on up to Harvey Pass. It was a 20 km hike. My altimeter said we ascended 4,200 feet, but my guide's said more like 3,700 feet. It was one of the most spectacular places I've been. Each level a different lake, up to a high meadow with streams everywhere. Yesterday we repeated a hike I did last year: Larch Valley up to Sentinel Pass, then down a really steep, difficult, and scary boulder field, and then through Paradise Valley.
Your photos are beautiful. What a gorgeous area. You are fortunate to be having such adventures, while we are stuck here fighting about politics as usual. Take a deep breath of wonderful air for me!
If I was a real photographer with a proper camera (instead of my itty bitty PowerShot 1000) I could bring back some really spectacular photos. My full-resolution ones are better than the 640X480 ones I can post here, though. A few more: (The third one is one of the hiking guides at Mt. Assiniboine Lodge, taken the last morning I was there, after it had snowed about 6 inches overnight -- July 10/11.)
No pictures the past few days: in wet weather I don't carry the camera. The above was taken this morning from my balcony.
On Tuesday we saw a grizzly about 20 meters away. It was a beautiful animal! I got a good picture, but it's high-res, and PC won't accept big files. I cannot reduce it until I get home, in a month. I'd be happy to email it to someone who'd be willing to reduce it and post it in this thread. PM me if you're interested, and be patient, as I cannot always log on. The cute girl jumping in the snow is one of the guides at Assiniboine Lodge.
