Heart Mountain to Twin Towers | 2010.04.04
Heart Mountain
- Location: Canmore
- Activity: Scrambling
- Height: 2,081 m (6,828 ft)
- Elevation Gain: 720 m (2,362 ft)
- Distance: 5.0 km / Round Trip (3.1 mi)
- Avg Steepness: 16.1°
- Estimated Time: 1.5-4 hrs
- Technicality: Intermediate
- Fitness Level: Moderate
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Above stats is only to Heart Mountain. For full stats of this trip please see page 6.
Day 3 of April long weekend. I was still sick. So I decided to do a scramble (makes no sense!).
I parked at side of HW1 just after Heart Creek parking. I took the trail for Heart mountain. The trail is well used and established, if you can manage not to find trailhead, I suggest to stand there for 10 minutes, I bet someone will come. I stayed on the trail until the summit of Grant MacEwan Peak (GR316551). From there I took the south ridge. The ridge was easy hiking until I hit the waypoint "Crux". I found two routes to take. East route was difficult or climber's scramble. West route was easier but still difficult scramble. See page 8 for lines. After the crux, the ridge get narrower and steeper. Before reaching the summit of west peak, you have a choice either take rock or scree (page 7). To get to east summit, I get down the steep south slope from summit cairn and lost 30 m of elevation (page 14). Then turned to east toward east summit.
For decent, I went back the same way but since Heart Mountain trail is quite steep, maybe doing loop by taking horseshoe (also called circuit in Daffern's book) is not a bad option.
* Grid References (GR) is based on WGS84 which can be considered as NAD83 (The difference is inciginificant)
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