Saturday, February 2, 2019

PRACTISE HIKING WAS FUN!

   75 % of my hiking involved taking students out on their outdoor field trips. The program had been set up and running before I was assigned a couple of outdoor ed classes.  People had to go out and check out locations and see if they would be suitable for students. Much of this had been done.

     This continued after I joined the program. Start checking your maps now. Every one of our trips involved driving out on the David Thompson highway. We would watch the land as we drove out to a hiking site. So the odd Saturday we would go out and check a location to see if it was suitable to take kids out. We'd look to see if there were trails. Was it too steep for kids? Were there dangers? So this was done on our weekends. Many times we got up early on a Saturday morning so that we could have time to go up and down and get back home in the evening. Some of these hikes were fast and some involved scrambling which is climbing over and among rocks.


    This shows me "scrambling" The last 200 meters to gain this peak were by scrambling. It was also steep. The water body is Abraham Lake .
 When we reached the peak or what we thought was the peak we found a cairn. I wrote about this before and how my friend had a near miss with a golden eagle. This turned out to be the end if a ridge and not a peak . If you continued along the narrow ridge you came to the actual peak. Of course we had to try for the peak. We didn't make it . The wind got up and since the ridge was very narrow we were afraid of being swept off the ridge.

     This was a very strenuous hike. We took kids or tried to take kids on this several times . Weather was always an issue. It could be very windy and sometimes very cold. I never did make it back to the cairn. Very few kids ever made it to the cairn.

   This was many of the Saturday adventures .

    Dates on the photos were when they were digitalized. The actual photos were from the late 80's or early 90's