The Passionate Hiker: Nihahi Ridge

Fri. 18 October: Nihahi Ridge and Six Hidden Treasures

Full moon setting in the west

Nihahi: familiar to anyone who has visited the western end of the Elbow Valley – which is practically the entire population of Calgary. This magnificent ridge, long and straight, stretching northwest from the Elbow Valley, looks a tempting hike from some angles. But it is in fact a challenging scramble.

To access the ridge, you follow a good trail from the Little Elbow campsite, and then you head upwards for as far as you feel comfortable to go. Most people stop short of the south summit.

For the second week in a row, JM was able to join me for this hike. We started early, on a cloudless, cold morning, from the trailhead below the campsite. There was ice in the puddles and a thin layer of snow in shady areas. Most of the leaves had now fallen, stripping the colour from the hillsides and creating a yellow carpet along the trail. Soon the sun rose from behind Forgetmenot Ridge, providing some much needed warmth.

There’s no danger of getting lost on this trail. It is well-used. Winding up the forested hillside it then traverses in a westerly direction through meadows and up onto the lower end of Nihahi Ridge. If you only got to this point, you would be rewarded with spectacular views west up the Elbow Valley, with superb peaks all around: Mt. Glasgow (9,629 ft.) to your left, Mts. Romulus (9,291 ft.) and Remus (8,819 ft.) in front of you, and the south summit of Nihahi (7,750 ft.) up the ridge to your right.

It’s a grand route up the ridge, and I puzzled as to why it had taken me over thirty years to get round to doing this hike. I could find no good excuse. There were footprints in the snow indicating there might be someone ahead of us, but then the footprints would disappear, only to reappear a little further up. This suggested someone might have come up here the night before, and the snow had then drifted across the tracks. There had been a full moon overnight, and I had heard that people sometimes do a night-time hike up mountains to see the setting moon. Higher up, we did glimpse three guys coming down off the ridge on a route which did not intersect ours.

As we continued to climb the ridge, we followed a path which contoured up the steep eastern slopes, into the trees. Here we were glad of our MICROspikes (and for J it was Yaktraks) on the slippery snow-covered path. Reaching an open section of ridge, directly below the south summit, we decided to stop here. We could see the trail continuing up along the east side of the ridge. The untouched snow told us that nobody was ahead of us.

This was about as far as the average day hiker might be comfortable to go, especially in slippery conditions. Soon a young guy caught up with us, as we were relaxing on the ridge, and after a brief greeting, he strode off up the ridge as if it were flat!

It was actually quite tricky getting back down this upper section, and without our spikes we would almost certainly have slipped our way down, probably out of control.

Somewhere on this high forested slope was a geocache – and we found it, hidden behind an ancient pine growing beside the cliff. The clue given to us was that it was “knee-high on Ni-ha-hi Ridge” (pun intended).

Dropping back down, we could clearly see the lines of the Little Elbow and Elbow Rivers, now wide gravel floodpaths where trees had been ripped up by the incredible wall of water that must have surged down the valley last June.

On our way down the ridge we passed one lone bearded hiker, not exactly a crowd. At the trailhead we turned west to the Elbow Trail. The floods had taken out an entire section of trail and forest, leaving gravel flats and piles of trees beside the river.

Turning east back along the trail, we started our search for several geocaches. One was hidden under a pile of logs, another behind a pine tree. Crossing the undamaged suspension bridge, we located three more sites, randomly located in the thick forest. J signed the “guestbook” at each site, and we added a trinket to each cache. It was quite fun heading off across the forest in search of a hidden box of treasures, as if we were kids again, playing hide and seek. Today we found all six of the geocache sites in the area.

On our way back down the Elbow Valley, we stopped to check out Forgetmenot Pond (no visible damage) and Elbow Falls (interpretive trail repaired and picnic table rescued from the river). There were plenty of people enjoying the perfect weather.

Unlike last week, we saw no moose or grizzlies, which was just as well, as we were more focused on following GPS coordinates through the forest than being on the lookout for wild animals!

Statistics:

Total Distance: 14.1 km (hike)

Height Gain: 2,273 ft.

Max. Elev.: 7,257 ft.

Time on Trail: 6 hrs. 33 mins.

Dep. car: 8.39 am

Ridge: 10.04 am

High point: 11.12 am

Trail Jn: 1.26 pm

Suspension Br: 2.17 pm

Ret. to car: 3.12 pm

Temp: Minus 4 to Plus 14 deg.C