With the GeoKids in camp every day this week, Mr. & Mrs. GeoK wanted to get in at least one hike. Drop-off and pick-up times constrained our options; with 3 unfound geocaches waiting for us we settled on the west ridge approach to Mount Baldy.
This is NOT one of our favourite hikes. It’s a slog – 450 m gain over 1.5 km, much of it on scree – to where we turned back. We found only one geocache, DNF’d the second and didn’t get closer than 900 meters from the third before turning back at a 6 or 7 meter long rock "bridge" that was about 45 cm wide with sheer drops off either side. Mr. GeoK was going to give it a try, but when the rock started crumbling in his hands he made the right decision and turned back. Even the weather conspired against us, with strong winds and cloud cover making for poor conditions for taking photos! Here are a couple of the better ones…
There must be some sort of bad karma between GeoKs and Mount Baldy. When we tried another approach 2 or 3 summers ago, oldest GeoKid went off a ledge and fell about 10 or 12 meters into a creek. There are plenty of other peaks in the Canadian Rockies, so I think we’ll give this one a wide berth from now on!