Assiniboine 2015 part 2: Smokin’

Our second day of hiking dawned a little hazy.  We assumed it was some sort of weird fog until it occurred to us that it was responsible for the campfire smell that we had noticed during the night.

Even with our view obscured by campfire smoke, the trail was stunning.  Since the longer view was hidden, we payed more attention to details that we might otherwise have missed.  The area around Mt. Assiniboine has a tremendous variety of ground cover and Fiona delighted in pointing out mushrooms and naming them.  I am not a mycologist, so some of these may be repeats, but there was still a huge variety.

     

Our second day’s hike was much shorter than the first and so even though we dallied in getting started, we arrived at the Og lake campground in reasonable time for dinner.  The lake itself was not huge, but was in a gorgeous valley surrounded by mountains.  It would have been nice to see them, but we still really enjoyed the surroundings.  Most happily for Tadhg it was the day that we ate the supper from his pack, so he would be treated to a lighter load on the third day.

Our third day of hiking was a short 7km to Lake Magog campground.  Though we were close to Mount Assiniboine, we could not tell it was there.  The smoke was thick enough that visibility was under 200m. We were disappointed, but we tried to make the best of it.

Since we figured the smoke probably wouldn’t last forever, we decided to stay an extra night and spend three nights rather than two at Lake Magog.  We figured that this would give us the time to wait for the smoke to clear.  Tadhg was dead set against it since it meant that we were redistributing the extra food among all of us instead of using it to curb his insatiable appetite.

    

We spent our days enjoying the mountains, dayhiking (though the views were somewhat obscured), swimming in the lakes (well, Fiona anyway), and enjoying what we could see.  We hiked the Nub a few times if it looked like the smoke was thinning in hopes of getting a good view.  Though we never got the spectacular views we hoped for, we did get the fun of the hikes and the kids got lots of time to play.

The evening of our second day at Magog was at least moderately clear.  Tania had the very good sense to hurry us through supper and down to the lake shore to take advantage of the break in the smoke.  It was a good thing since this was the clearest view we would get of the majestic Mt. Assiniboine.

Part 3 coming soon