Mon, Aug 1 2005 - Ptarmigan and Black Prince Cirques (View Original Event Details)
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We split into two groups at carpool with Michelle's group going to Black Prince Cirque first, and my group going to Ptarmigan Cirque, then trading. It was a beautiful day, and both hikes, although short and easy, were very pleasant and enjoyable. In fact, I was glad we didn't have anything more challenging for the day because I'm still recovering from my cold from last week and was "done" before I was, technically, done, today.
Although neither of these hikes were to feature hoodoos, there was one hoodoo sighting by Glenn on the return from Black Prince.
It seemed to work out very well with the two groups - better than I had actually expected. Thanks, Michelle, for taking the other group!
-- Rhonda
This was my first attempt at co-coordinating anything with the COC and I was pleased that it seemed to go rather well considering. Thank you Rhonda for doing all the real work!
Our first stop was The Black Prince Cirque. It was the shorter of the two cirques at only 4.3km return, but the little green lake was very beautiful. When searching online for some info on this cirque (as it wasn’t listed in any of my books) I found a webpage describing “letterboxing”, which I was later told is very similar to geocaching. The webpage I found described where to find a letterbox on the trail. The directions were very simple; no tricky riddles to solve or complex directions. We found it in the first place we looked. This being the first letterbox I’ve found, I was very curious to see what was in this thing. There were several letters/notes in which the writing had all run due to previous water damage. There was a log book in which one uses the pencil provided along with their personal stamp to “sign in”. I didn’t have a personal stamp but I signed it regardless – my hands never work well when I’m hiking so it was more like chicken scratch than anything. I then took the stamp from inside the box and stamped the pamphlet I picked up from the box at the trailhead to take home with me. One normally carries their own log book in which they collect the stamps from the various letterboxes around the world. I may just have to make myself my own stamp and log book and then find me some more letterboxes. There are a few more in Alberta apparently. Maybe I’ll make up my own letterbox and stash it up somewhere high and beautiful for other people to find and document.
The second stop was Ptarmigan Cirque. Morley K wasn’t with us for the first hike of the day but he joined us for the second. This was a somewhat more strenuous hike but still quite short. The flowers when we came out of the trees were gorgeous, as was the rock face that surrounded us at the top of the loop. We did do the little bit of climbing up to a pile of rocks in the base of the basin. Yoda relished eating and rolling in the patch of dirty snow that remained up there. I wonder if he’ll see snow in Calgary again. In any case, I’m glad he had the opportunity to enjoy it again… he loves it so. Orlando and Marco were snap happy for most of the trip… collecting photos galore to later reflect upon their time in the Rockies. Orlando returns to Brazil in less than a week I believe. We hope he’ll come back to join us again soon! We were back down in the Highwood parking lot by 1:30pm where then we discussed what to do next. After passing ideas around and assessing the status of our legs, we decided to call it a day and headed back to town for drinks and food at Kilkenny’s.
-- Michelle