We are so spoiled by the beautiful nature in the area, every weekend is a new adventure filled with wonderful views. As part of our 'Spring Warm-Up' we went hiking on a moderately challenging route about an hour drive West of Calgary in Kananaskis Park. The Barrier Lake Reservoir is noticeable as we look down in a North Western direction, towards Canmore and Banff.
Our hike begins in the Lusk Creek Provincial Recreation area, we cross the road and head up the pass in a mossy forest. There is some logging activity in the area and a Bio-Geoscience field camp for the University of Calgary nearby. Other than that, it's just nature, no human lives within miles of the area.
The trail is relatively well marked but you need to keep a lookout for signs when to turn off the logging road. I wouldn't recommend going here without GPS, a smart phone with a hiking app is fine. We use GAIA GPS.
This time of year flowers are found lower in the valleys, we will be following them up towards the peaks as the season progresses. I'm not a fan climbing up snow or icy trails so we are slowly making our way up into the Rocky Mountains. Most of the snow will be gone towards the end of June as it has been a hot Spring.
It has also been a very dry Spring with the first major rains coming this week. Alberta and Canada in general has had its worse forest fire season in decades with 11 million acres, or an area 'twice the size of New Jersey' according to CNN having been lost to fires in just 5 months.
We love hiking and seeing trees, it's just sad because most of these fires have been intentionally started by lunatics. Even new growth forests in logging areas pictured below are beautiful. I'm glad none of the fires have been anywhere near Kananaskis or Banff.
The view from a couple hundred meters above the valley is always the highlight of a hike. It only gets better as you go further up and this is relatively gradual so at no point is it a problem for those afraid of heights.
All we really seem to do all summer is walk around and take pictures over the weekend. I never grow tired of it and will probably take a few random days off to enjoy hiking even more in the high season.
We saw two other groups the entire time. It's so serene, you can take a path back or follow the logging road. We usually take the trail as the road is more boring, although you do see more animals along roads as they are open.
Barrier lake looks better from far. We frequently hike in that area, Jewell Pass is to the left and Prairie View Trail or Yates peak is in the center just behind the lake.
In the middle of nowhere they had some signs and benches. They spoke about the lake, they call this an interpretive trail. We didn't see any large animals asides from deer on the main road. You almost always see deer but we have seen bears a few times already this year. I'll post about those adventures soon.
The trail back offered a nice change of scenery for a few hundred meters through a birch grove. Or Aspen, I'm not a tree expert, I think it is birch though because the Aspen fluff is everywhere and obvious around the end of May.
We hiked about 8.5 km, in the opposite direction of those arrows or clockwise and we didn't follow the green line but cut through the path bisecting the loop as we didn't want to follow the logging road any longer than what was necessary. As you can see it's ranked #22/126 for hikes in the immediate area. There are thousands and we will never run out or have to do a bad hike if such a thing even exists.
All photos taken with an s22 and unedited