Saturday, September 15, 2018

Fall colors in full glory; a flurry of activities




The red aspens really lit up the Front

Mount Wright highlighted by aspens

Our group on the flanks of Wolf Butte

On the trail to Ptarmigan Tunnel in Glacier Park

The always beautiful Ptarmigan area
In the past week I've climbed Mount Wright in the Front for the second time this summer and Wolf Butte in the Little Belts, taken a side trip to the Cypress Hills in Saskatchewan and Alberta, and hiked to Ptarmigan Tunnel in Glacier National Park.
What they all had in common was spectacular early Fall colors.
The most surprising were the reds in the Front aspens and ground cover.  In all my years of hiking there I've never seen such red.  The only other place I have seen red rather than golds and yellows in the aspens has been in Utah, where red predominates.
The Fall colors have been magnificent, if a bit early this year.
We saw them in abundance at Many Glacier on the Ptarmigan Trail.
They weren't as showy in the Cypress Hills, though.
The Cypress Hills trip included a tour of Fort Walsh, once the headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted, a visit to Medicine Hat where we toured the famed Medalta pottery factory in the pottery district, a strange badland south of Medicine Hat full of "concretions" and an interesting windmill museum between Medicine Hat and Lethbridge in Etzikom, Alberta
My new favorite photo of Katie on a concretion in the Red Rocks Canyon a half hour south of Medicine Hat 
A sampling of the windmills at Etzikom, Alberta windmill museum

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