The Edmonton Swiss Society organized  a snowshoeing trip to the Rocky Mountains for the Family Day weekend. A small group of six people participated and, let me tell you, snowshoeing is fun!

On Saturday, we all met at the A&W in Canmore at the ungodly hour of 8:15 am - well ok, the Kirchens were a couple of minutes late… Joe Stadler and Jeanette Gasser (who had organized the trip) led up the Smith-Dorrien highway into Kananaskis Country. As we proceeded South there was actually snow. We parked one of our cars at Mount Engadine Lodge and, after transferring all the gear and people into the two remaining cars, drove another 6 km to the Chester Lake parking lot. The plan was to hike up to Chester Lake and then try to cross over to the Rummel Lake trail and from there back to Mount Engadine Lodge. The 4.8 km hike up to Chester Lake  was incredible; the trail lead up through snowed-in forest, a welcome sight after the lack of snow in Edmonton and Canmore. After a light lunch at Chester Lake, we embarked on some trail finding to cross over to the Rummel Lake trail. We did quite well under Joe and Jeannette’s guidance, even crossed a creek (safely, nobody fell in), but then had to do some very “applied” snowshoeing and route finding that unfortunately was not successful; eventually we had to turn around and go back the way we had come. (Maggie’s comment: This was my first winter sport outing since I broke my legs; I thought it went so well that, if I could snowshoe, I could also ski. We celebrated my feat with a bottle of bubbly at Chez François while waiting for our dinner; we think we may have gloated a little too much about the win of the Swiss Men’s hockey team over the Canadians…the food took forever to arrive!).

On Sunday, we met again at A&W and from there proceeded up the Smith-Dorrien highway; this time we were headed for the Burstall Pass trailhead. Again the weather cooperated (it was quite windy though) and we were able to take in the wonderful scenery as we hiked up toward the pass. As we steadily gained altitude through some steep sections where we all slowed down to more of a crawl, I started to worry a bit about my knee and the fact that what goes up will have to come down eventually. I decided to turn around at what I thought was about half an hour from the pass. Little did I know that the others would reach the pass in only fifteen minutes and the descent was no problem (no route finding difficulties here!). I still completed about 15 km of the 16 km hike and am very proud of that! I did opt to take a day of rest on Monday so I would be able to ski on Tuesday and Wednesday while the others took a shorter hike up to Commonwealth Lake.

A big thank you to Jeannette Gasser for organizing this trip and to Joe Stadler and her for guiding our hikes. I hope we can do this again next year!
 

Maggie Kirchen

Click herefor photos of this snowshoeing trip