It was a beautiful fall day, with almost no wind, and there were still some trees with their fall colours. Our planned route was a "bolo," that is two loops with a connection between.
Group "summit shot" on the first High Noon Hill
After going over the first High Noon Hill and dropping down, we had a difficult time finding Gillean Daffern's connection #3B at a "saddle." Well there was no saddle, rather a coulee, so we passed the correct trail, which was actually a braided cow trail so very hard to pick out. We stopped at a dim, narrow trail coming up a ridge, but went on to another coulee, where we took a well beaten cow trail, which just contoured along the hill and was obviously never going to cross Long Prairie Creek. So we dropped down to a tributary canyon and contoured around until ending up back on the previous ridge trail.
Descending cross-country looking for the connecting "trail" to Sandy McNabb Hills
From there we took another cow trail which ended up connecting to the "correct" trail, finally taking us to a crossing of the creek on a log. From there it didn't take long to come out on the Long Prairie, where we stopped for lunch.
Reaching the summit of the East Sandy McNabb Hill
Looking east to the Long Prairie and Okotoks Mountain
We then finished the connector and did the loop around and over the East Sandy McNabb Hill, with fine views. We then retraced our steps to the first High Noon loop and took the lower side of the loop back to our cars.
The trip did turn out to be OT3 rather than the advertised TL2, but a good time was had by all. Some of the valley cow trails were a little muddy but high hill trails were dry. We covered 13 km, so our extra wanderings added a kilometre to the trip.
Lady bugs were the only wildlife. There were some "guns and ammo" fanatics across the Sheep River, so it sounded like a war going on. Fall cattle drive was in full swing. We saw some cowboys herding cattle on the Long Prairie, and could hear the bawling of the rounded up herd at the Sheep River community range. We were back at the cars by 3:40.
Participants: Yolande, Francisco, Linda, Robert, Douglas, Margo (photo), Barb, George, Madeleine and Carl, coordinator and scribe.
