Tertils Outdoors

08_03_09 Prairie Mountain 2210 m (7250ft)

• Posted on March 9, 2008 at 7:50 PM
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Prairie Mountain 2210m (7250ft)

At 11 am as agreed we met at the barrier by Elbow Falls in beautiful Bragg Creek area. By "we met" I mean Matt (my son) and I with my friend from work - Al and his two boys, Joshua and Matthew. As you might noticed we now had two Matts, we call my Matt "Big Matt" while the other one just Matt, Matthew or "Small Matt". After initial getting organized" we were willing and ready so we started slowly up along the trail. Beautiful, almost spring weather, at the beginning it was pretty mucky but as we slowly gained elevation there was more and more snow. Eventually there was lots of snow and all of it very wet and slippery. It took us almost 3 hours to make it to the top, not exactly "lightening speed" but bear in mind that we had two small boys with us (nice to have good excuse like that (lol)) and this was my first real hike in 2 years that is since I broke a leg doing back country skiing. Couple that with my 220 lb (104 kg) and I am sure you'll get the picture. Anyway, we made it to the top, the views were stunning as might be expected. I have been coming to this summit for many years and I can see how it is getting more and more popular each year. This time there was pretty much always somebody coming up ahead of us or down, steady traffic you might say. The nice thing of this mountain is the fact that it is in the very first range as you look from Calgary so you can imagine the view, you could see the city and it surroundings pretty good. We didn't spent too much time on the top because it was getting pretty windy and cold. As we made it back down we stopped shortly before end of the trail and made small fire, had some sausages and buns. Everyone was pretty hungry by now so as always in this kind of situation food tasted right even though we were missing ketchup, mustard, onions etc. By 5:30 pm we were back on the parking lot ready to go back to "big city". So here you have it, if you around Calgary and want to do a quick hike which is not exactly walk in the park, do Prairie Mountain.