Real Hikers, Kind of
Our first official hike of the summer recently took place in Canada at Lower Bugaboo Falls, near Spillimacheen, British Columbia. This hike is classified as ‘moderate’ by my AllTrails app which described it as a short 2.9-km out-and-back mountain trail hike with some steep portions, rocks and roots to navigate that should only take a little over an hour to complete. AllTrails content is obviously written by someone who doesn’t have a granny-bod.
The trail is very pretty and the falls spectacular, it was well worth the effort and clearly demonstrated to me that if I am going to survive this summer of touristing, I need to get in better shape, round isn’t going to cut it here in the North. I am happy to report that after some knee icing, pain killers and one very uncomfortable night, I could almost walk normally down a flight of steps the next day. It’s weird that the downhill parts hurt so much more than the uphill parts. While it took us a bit longer than an hour (ALL MORNING), we made it there and back and we were pretty darn proud of ourselves for accomplishing the feat. This is the first time we tried out our brand-new hiking poles and they were very helpful to us for keeping our balance on the rocky parts and making it up and down the steep bits. What I learned is that I will stick with easy trails for a bit and work my way up to moderate trails after a little more practice. Turns out my usual granny-bod workout of walking through the grocery store didn’t really prepare me for mountain trail hiking.
Our second official hike was the Lake Louise Lakefront Trail in Banff National Park, Alberta. This trail sounded like it was much more my speed. Classified as a ‘simple’ 2.8-mile easy-peasy stroll that only takes 1.8 hours to complete per those young punks at AllTrails. We had every confidence this was our kind of trail. We thought that we allowed ourselves ample time (3 hours) to complete the trail and get back to our outgoing bus. In our defense, we stopped along the route to take a lot of pictures. Suddenly, before we knew it, the bus was due any minute and we were still halfway down the lake. Thankfully the trail was flat, because we were hoofing it back double-time to the bus stop. We made it just in time to board without a minute to spare. We were sweating, profusely. Easy-Peasy my Aunt Fannie! The rewards were great though and we are glad we went all the way to the end of the lake to see the glaciers and the frozen waterfalls; they were spectacular.
So now that we are real hikers with poles, bear bells and two whole trails under our belts, what we have learned is to take however much time AllTrails says it takes to complete a hike, quadruple it and add an hour. Also, we are now stocked up on ice packs, ibuprofen and knee braces.
Onward and Upward,
