Ha Ling Climb

So as I mentioned in my last post, yesterday morning Bob and I decided to go for a hike up the Mountain in front of my house called Ha Ling. We weren't really sure what to expect, as we had never been up there before, but we knew it was going to be quite the adventure. And it did not disappoint.

We left the house around 7:45am to begin the hike to up to the start of the trail which we were told led straight to the top. After probably a little under an hour, we broke out of the tree line after doing switchback after switchback, and we could see the top (it was still very far away, but we could see it). And as much fun as walking up a cleared trail was, we figured it would be way more exciting to make our own trail and just hike straight up instead of winding our way on the trail. And with the combination of the loose rocks and incredible steepness, it was quite the adrenaline rush to say the least.

After about 30 minutes of climbing through the loose rocks on our hands and feet, we reached the top. It was so sudden, neither of us could believe it. I just walked up to a big rock and peeked over to see what I thought would be a flat surface before the cliff. But to my surprise, that rock was actually the start of the cliff. I can't begin to describe how beautiful and "unreal" if you will, the view is from up there. I was firing pictures left, right and centre, trying to get as many as I could to hopefully help everyone reading this to get a feel for just how incredible it was. From the top we could see all of Canmore just sitting right in front of us, to our left we could see the snow covered mountains on the other side of Banff, and if we looked towards Calgary, we could actually see some of the towers from the city. Being 110km away, that was truly spectacular.

After taking pretty much all the pictures we could from Ha Ling, we decided it was still early enough that we had time to hike back down a little bit and then back up the peak next to it. I'm not sure what this one is called, but it was very cool, and definately tested my fear of heights (I won't get into details). So we sat down at the top of that one and ate lunch, then began our journey back down the mountain. We definately had some fun with this, taking videos of ourselves attempting to run as fast as we could down the mountain, while still being in control of course. Bob has those videos, and we're currently working on editting them and they should be up on our facebook pages in the next few days.

So that was our Ha Ling climb experience in a nutshell, another one of Bob and Jordan's great adventures. I have put most of my pictures up in a new album on picasa, so if you're interested feel free to follow the link below. Take care everyone!

Ha Ling Hike