Introduction

Our Destination

Teresa, one of Lisa's friends from UBC, visited us for a few days. She enjoys hiking so, along with Jola and Joe, we arranged a hike. It being early in the season, we didn't have a huge choice of snow free hikes. Over a wonderful pancake breakfast provided by Jola in their newly renovated dining room, we decided on Moose Mountain.

Moose Mountain (lat: 50.94, lon: -114.84 - use GoogleEarth to see a sky view of it) is the first mountain west of Bragg Creek that sticks its head above the treeline. The trail from where the forestry road stops is now 6km one way with an altitude gain of 473m, but one actually does more because the hike starts by going down 100m. There is a forestry fire lookout at the top.

This hike lead me into learning a bit more about the Draba and Potentilla genuses (genii?). I had mis-identified one of the flowers and left one unidentified. That eventually lead me to a paper on the flora of the Canadian arctic, which is the ecological zone of the top of Moose Mountain. See the picture descriptions for more information and links.

Each picture has further description of itself and the hike.

None of the pictures are large enough to make good 4x6 prints. If you want to print any of these, please send me the reference numbers (reference numbers at lower right of pictures or lower middle of toenails) are of the pictures and I can send you (or put on the web) big enough ones for printing.