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After our lazy day, Sunday turned out to the the first of many quite strenuous hikes, although not entirely by design! We had spotted a relatively modest hike along the Watridge Lake and Karst Trails. The most arduous part of the day looked to be a long drive up the gravel mountain road in our hire car with huge 4x4s zooming past and leaving us in thick dust clouds. Spray Lake Reservoir was a typical bright blue colour - all the lakes have tones of blue and turquoise caused by limestone particles in the water. Variation in particles is the cause of the range of tones seen in particular lakes.
After driving the length of Spray Lake Reservoir we found the "trail head" car park and set off with blue skies and an obvious well signed path. About every kilometre there were signs saying Watridge Lake straight on so when we came to a left fork with no sign we assumed the route must be straight on still, particularly as the guide book talked about ignoring a left turn which was an old trail. So on we walked for another 2.5km and when we reached a significant bridge and creek we consulted the map and realised we'd missed our turn and this was Spray Creek. However, it did provide a beautiful setting for lunch by the river with a great view down the valley to Cone Mountain (see photo).
After lunch we doubled back having turned our walk into more like 15 than 10 km! We found Watridge Lake, beautiful with its mountain backdrop (see photo), and then headed up the relatively short, wooded Karst Trail. This led up beside Elizabeth Falls which were made all the more spectacular by knowing that their entire source was a Limestone/Karst spring at the bottom of a cliff - our walk objective. Seeing such a substantial flow of water, effectively a river, issuing from the ground was quite a sight.
We were now a little later in the day than we had intended by the time we got back to the car but serendipity then presented us with the wonderful sight of a Cinnamon Bear foraging through the buffaloberry bushes about 20m away from the road back to Canmore. This was a big bear that we first took to be a grizzly. However, we emailed a photo to Laura who corrected our sighting advising that a grizzly would have had a prominent shoulder hump. Still, this bear, a 'blonde' version of a Black Bear is quite a rare sight and spending those minutes in safe but close proximity was one of the highlights of the trip to date.
Just out of Canmore we also came across a group of Big-horn Sheep wandering nonchalantly along the road side. They were totally unimpressed by the cars that all had to pull up or drive slowly round them. For our first proper taste of Rockies walking, scenery and wild life this had us both looking forward to our time here and some, possibly planned, more ambitious hikes. And that's certainly what we got!
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Sally Awesome awesome awesome! You are having the best adventure ever! Thanks for blogging.