.:: Highwood Meadows Scramble ::.

08.19.2002

    It was a beautiful morning in Calgary. The sun was shinning and there were hardly any clouds in the sky. Both Scott and I had the day off, so around 10:00am Scott and I headed West of Calgary to Kananaskis Country. We wanted to go for a bit of a hike and enjoy the nice weather. Since it was so late in the day, we were thinking about heading up to Chester Lake. I had never seen the lake in liquid phase, so I thought that it would be interesting. However, we were too interested with the GPS that Scott brought along that we ended up missing the turn off up to the Spray Lakes area. Also, that road is a gravel road and Scott was not too keen on taking his car up there. Instead, we managed to have a peek at the Upper and Lower Kananaskis Lakes. There were quite a few people parked and looking at the lakes, so we decided to go back to Highway 40 and keep going South. Here we ran into a herd of Bighorn Sheep. Most of the sheep were young and not big horned. So, Scott prefers to refer to them as, "Mountain Sheep". I sure have not seen sheep for awhile, so it was a nice surprise.
 
    Many of the hiking trails were roped off and had bear warnings, so we did not want to really stay in the valley. Instead, we decided to stop at a parking lot just North of the Highwood Meadows Picnic area and climb up one of the mountains. We are unsure of which mountain it was because our map was not detailed enough and the GPS we were using was mainly for roads. So, we spent the afternoon climbing up and then down a mountain. The mountain was over 2000ft high, had snow on it, a >60° incline, and many rocks near the top. Here are a few pictures of our hike up the mountain.

:: pictures were taken by Scott and Niccole ::