Trekking with Nicola (and the dogs)

 There are many Valley View trails in the world. This is the one that follows the zipline road above the Fairmont Hot Springs Resort. The official trail follows the road that then cuts over to the ski hill and down. However, instead, of turning toward the ski hill we continue up the road. That leads to what must have been the old Valley View Trail which was also a cross-country ski trail. Unfortunately, back in 2016, the bridge across the creek washed out. This is easily crossed however, further up the trail got wiped out by a landslide where it now subsequently ends. We've walked this in the spring and now the fall. Very picturesque despite it's abrupt ending.  Nicola crossing the creek where the bridge View down the valley from the trail got washed out   Fairmont Peak                     Larches turning their colour Nicola, Hart, Pippa and Guapo the dogs.

Hart, our son, joined us on a hike to Boom Lake today. Apparently, there's natural log jam that forms on the lake's outlet. The hike is a relatively easy 10.8 kilometres in and out with a 578 metre elevation gain. The trail is wide with few rocks or roots so walking at full stride presents no problem at all. As a result, we were able to do the hike in a little under three hours including a break at the lake.  This is our second hike this year in Banff National Park. The other one was up Parker Ridge. It's kind of like the United Nations. Maybe half of the people we passed spoke English as their first language and about a third would be Chinese.  Like a good highway, the hike itself was kind of boring. We mainly passed through spruce forests with large chunks of old man' beard moss hanging in large chunks from the branches of the trees. Nicola said that David Thompson wrote about the native people grinding the moss into a type of flour and then making pancakes that were ...

 We didn't get to the trailhead until 12 noon. The hike is 14.5 kilometres in and out with a 780 metre rise. And that didn't include our walk beyond the lake. Bottom line, gruelling day. The trail was good though so it was a brisk walk down.  The larches are spectacular in the fall. Even on a dreary, cloudy day, they seemed to glow. That was like the day of our hike. Cloudy and cool and cooler with every few hundred metres rise. A memorial bench overlooks the lake. That's where we stopped for a drink of water and a granola bar. Almost immediately, we left the cold so our first order of business was to pull our down sweaters from the backpack.  The vertical walls of Mount Norman border the far side of the lake. Its scree slope falls into the lake allowing only a few larches to cling to its lower slope. Larches are common in the marshes surrounding our old home in Slave Lake but here in the Columbia Valley, they're only found in the upper elevations.  A family of three...