The Hope was very determined to do another hike with me but he is afraid of ice and snow and early rising! So we sat together to check the available trips. Due to the ridiculous winter so far we were able to do many hikes but eventually he suggested to go to southern Kananaskis and do Bull Creek Hills. We met at our rendezvous point at about 07:10 and headed south. Bull Creek Hills are close to where I had a hike with my other buddy a few months ago. It is located in Highway 541. It is far away so by the time we pulled in to a road side parking spot, put our gears on and walked to the trail-head, it was almost 09:40!
The trail goes into the forest and The Hope following a book that he had just bought from MEC took us to to so-called view points just to cover the entire trip that we had read earlier. The first one was supposed to give us a good view of Holy Cross Mountain but due to low fog we barely saw anything! Then we turned back and went up the trail and got ourselves to another viewpoint which was supposed to give us a look at a so-called peninsula. I guess that was a piece of land surrounded by Highwood River but nothing impressive. We continued on a ridge to north from there after a short break and I guess it was almost 12:00 at the time. The Hope felt that we had done such a great deal of work out and found himself worthy of eating an Egg Salad Sandwich which he had already made! I just had a few gulps of Kefir drink which The Lady has made busy herself with recently. I will write about that in a different post. Walking up the trail toward north it took us to the first two hill and then to the highest one which from there you can get a 360 view of the surrounding area. From the top if you look north you can easily sea Downtown Calgary skyline!
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| Looking west now the fog is gone and sun is up. Holy Cross Mountain must be one of these ones seen in the photo |
We just took a few photos from there and then headed east to make a look to get ourselves to Highway 541 again. There was a little of route finding required at the time but The Hope had just purchased a mobile app which I guess cost him some $30 and helped us very well although we knew that we had to walk east and then south. There was another hill, the forth one and after that our trip started losing its elevation. The Hope is a good hiking partner but first of all he stops too frequently. Second of all he feels he has to eat every two hours although this time he only stopped once. I guess his mind is a little too occupied with unemployment and other things because he forgot his hiking pole once when we where on the top of the highest hill and when we were heading down, he realized that and hiked up and got it! Then when were heading down he stopped to use the bushes and then followed me after a few minutes(!), at the time I looked back and I saw him walking down without his hiking pole and I thought he had put it in his backpack but he suddenly said that he had forgotten it up top! I guess we had descended too far down that made him to forget about the pole! We finally got ourselves to Highway 541 where the big tall Kananaskis Country sign besides the three flags are located. From there we had almost 45 min. walk to west to get to the car. I guess it was 17:15 when we reached the car. It was a good exercise, walking long routes and we got some 700 m. of elevation. The views were nice and we got tired. It's not a challenging hike and requires no technical knowledge or special equipment but gives you a good workout and requires a good route finding.
(Photo: This is taken from the highest of the three [or four] Bull Creek hills looking north. Calgary's downtown high rises can be easily seen on the center of photo)
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