During this summer I with my friends have been hiking in and around Calgary Rockies every Saturday. This Saturday too we planned to go on a hike, but we kept hearing these horror stories about hungry bears attacking happy campers and hikers. The reason sited all round for this bizarre bear behavior is non-availability of ripe berries, which the bears feast on late summer and early fall.
Calgary had a very wet summer. I don’t know whether its el nino or al nina. We didn’t have many sunny days. Berries need some good sun to ripe and lack of some good sun made the ripe berries really scarce. The bears are mistaking people for ripe berries I don’t blame them and we being on MacDeit doesn’t really help.
A wee bit hesitant to turn up on the dining table of a mama bear we set to Kananaskis country, which is a provincial park and has very active bear monitoring program. The rangers in ranger station didn’t sound very alarming, so feeling bit more comfortable about returning back to Calgary in one piece, we set out finding a good hike (note to self: decide where to hike the day before, it’s a never a good idea to decide a hike while driving). We drove till Highwood pass the highest motorable pass in the Canadian Rockies and found a parking spot.
We found a two-hour strenuous hike, which seemed to promise everything, a hike up above the tree line to an alpine meadow, a waterfall and an extinct prehistoric glacier. With wetted appetites, we being intrepid explorers set on this hike. It seemed that this hike is pretty popular and we kept on encountering people all through the hike. The hike was up a ridge and we kept on gaining elevation constantly. It was bit tiring for the members of our party, yours truly never really owns up of being weary. With ample of pit stops we reached this beautiful alpine meadow on the top of the ridge. It was full of the beautiful flowers and a small stream running through it. By looking at this stream u could never realize that this stream has enough enery to gorge out deep incision into the outcrop. The incision is at least 5-8 meters deep. I figured out the secret of its energy, just read on.
We walked on and the landscape changed to that of the glacial wasteland, but I couldn’t see any. I looked around and there they were all the tell tale signs of a glacier the sequence of terminal moraines and stretching horizontal moraines. There were deep striations on the bedrock too. This was that extinct glacier. It must have been living and kicking not long ago in geologic past, if I could foolishly hazard a guess( I am no glaciologist, geologist by anyways) it would have been extinct in last couple of centuries. This explains the deep gorge; the stream is just a shadow of its powerful self, which ran of from this powerful glacier to gorge out this deep canyon (can I call this so?)
As we were hiking back, a storm moved in and it started raining heavily, we hurried back into the car in time and started back to Calgary dry and in one piece.