Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Lindsay hits the trail some more!

Well, we couldn’t have had better weather on the climbs this weekend.  When I got out of the tent on Saturday morning there was not one cloud in the sky, just bright blue and sunshine.  Grotto Mountain started out okay, but about an hour and a half into the climb it became relentless.  Once again I had my pack on with most of the gear I would need to bring for the Rainier climb and for some reason it really felt heavy this time.  It seemed like it was taking forever to get to the summit.  All I could think of was I hope the hike up to Camp Muir would not be as steep.  My husband and I ran into some big horn sheep on the ridge approaching the summit and they didn’t appear to care that we were even there.  It took us just under 5 hours to climb 1425 m with our weighted packs and just under 3 hours to get back down.  We were both pretty tired when we got back to the car and ready for a relaxing evening at the campground.  We did stop at a gas station in Canmore to get some much needed Powerade and water as we both felt pretty dehydrated, even though we had both packed a litre of water and half a litre of gatorade.  The next morning we had prepared for it to be cloudy and raining, but to our surprise there was a bright blue sky and it was sunny.  We cleaned up our campsite and headed to climb Ha Ling Peak.  This is a pretty popular climb in the area so we wanted to get an early start so the trail wouldn’t be too crowded.  Ha Ling Peak is an easy scramble with an elevation gain of 700 m.  It took us under 2 hours to get to the summit and just over an hour to descend.  Since we leave for Seattle in two weeks we have decided to forego climbing next week and instead just continue with the gym workouts.   
I can't believe there is only 2 more weeks until we leave for Seattle - I hope the weeks go by fast :)

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