Muncho Lake Provincial Park

Even when you've been somewhere before, it's never the same as it was when you were last there. This is part of the excitement and lure of traveling.

The Muncho Lake area is just beautiful. Note the fresh snow on the mountains in this first photo!

Salt Lick hike

Hoodoos at the salt lick

I stopped off the road at a place where there is supposed to be a salt lick. This is where the mountain goats and Stone sheep come to get the calcium and other minerals they need to grow strong bones.

I've been to a few of these before, but have only once actually seen an animal at one. Perhaps it should be no surprise, as folk wisdom has it that they come in the spring (not the fall) with their kids and lambs so that the young animals can get the nutrition they needs. Also, the mom's need the extra minerals for their milk.

So there, were no animals here today, but it was still a pretty hike, since the some of the sediments here have been eroded into hoodoos.

Part of the salt lick trail, through fields of Anemone Canadensis seedheads

The "flowers" in the foreground of this picture are actually all seed heads, I think of anemones (Anemone Canadensis, aka Western Chaliceflower). Curiously, although I have seen many of these seedheads in a lot of places, I've never seen the flowers! Can you imagine what this must look like when in full bloom?

This section of highway has something to see everywhere, from the turquoise blue waters of Muncho Lake to the high surrounding mountains.

These mountains are subject to heavy summer thundershowers, and the huge amount of water that is dumped on the mountains causes flash flooding in the canyons. The high energy of the water (from the steep terrain), is able to move incredible amounts of material downhill onto alluvial fans that run into the lake. These fans are so big that you can even see them on maps of the lake – look at the base of any of the canyons, and there will be a semi-circular shape extending into the lake (the fan)!

They have had to manage this because otherwise all this material would run onto the road!

They have bulldozed channels so that the water — carrying everything from gravel to pebbles to cobbles to boulders — is guided through huge culverts that run under the highway.

I suppose that this works most of the time.

A helpful Inukshuk "trail" marker

This was as far as I got!

I took a hike up one of these canyons: the Boulder Canyon. There is not really a trail, you just make your way up the canyon. I was lured by the photos of a waterfall, but, being late summer, there was no water in the waterfall, only a few pools of clear water.

This was probably a good thing, since I was able to clamber up the place where the waterfall would have been and make it a little farther up the canyon. I stopped at the place where it truly became a slot canyon — I would not have been able to make it through, and the sides were sheer enough that I would have had to have been a rock climber to make it up.

It was a really interesting hike.

It's been quite awhile since I've been hiking in limestone, and in fact, the area reminded me a bit of the Poleta Folds area where we did summer field geology.

There were some really interesting structures in the limestone, so pardon the digression for geology's sake.

Believe me, in this slot canyon I was really keeping an eye to the weather.

Fortunately, it did not rain. It would have been terrifying to be here when it was raining in the mountains.

Stromatolites?

Tiny fossil

Ok, thanks for bearing with me about the exciting geology fossil pictures!

I meandered along the route, and stopped (again!) along the Toad River, so called because cars were "towed" along the route. There were a hundred places one could have stopped. This is only one.

The water is this beautiful turquoise color, NOT because of glacial flour, but because of the particles of dissolved calcite (from limestone) in the water.

Toad River

This is another example of one of the big alluvial fans that push into (in this case) the river, not a lake. This fan has not been controlled at all, because the highway is on the other side of the river. I'd kind of like to see a sudden storm that would send huge amounts of material down onto the fan, but then, again, maybe not!

I finally stopped for the evening at Summit Lake, in Stone Mountain Provincial Park. It was cold and windy, but not as cold as the last time I was through here, when there were 4" of snow on the ground! I finished off the evening by listening to political pundits talk about the goings on in Charlottesville while finishing my beading project.

Summit Lake campsite