*I hope people use their own wise judgement when hiking always plan ahead and be prepared. One should never go beyond their abilities.*

Over the years I've had a few goals my first was to Summit all the Peaks of Waterton. Here is My Waterton Summit List I completed that goal on September 26, 2016.

My next goal I'm still working on and that is to summit the 6 10,000 foot Summmits of Glacier National Park. I have one left Kintla.

My 2018 Goal that I accomplished was to summit 40 peaks in my 40th year and that I finished on September 26, 2018.

Not sure what will be my next goal, once Glacier's Summits are done?

I commonly use 3 Hashtags on my social media. The first one is #itookthepathlesstraveledby which is to reference this blog. The next two relate to my father and grandfather who were also hikers. #milesformarkellingson is to remember my
Dad, Mark Ellingson and #dustfromthetrailandhowitsettledonme is to remember my Grandfather Earl Ellingson

November 26, 2016

Crandell Mountain November 26, 2016

What a great day!  We headed up to Waterton early not knowing which mountain we wanted to climb and decided once we got there.  The mountains were pretty covered in snow and Crandell didn't seem as covered as the others..so voila we decided on Crandell and what a great choice it was.  We headed up Bear's hump and followed the ridge all the way to the peak.  Last time I had done this peak was in 2005 and we took the same route up.  Except this time we had to stay off the spine of the ridge as it was covered in snow a bunch of the time so our route finding was utilized greatly today.  We did have some pretty steep cliffs to climb up, luckily Crandell rock is pretty solid and the areas we had to climb were free of snow.  The views of the mountains today where spectacular and we were rewarded with a cloudless summit view.  It had been cloudy most of the way up but once we summited we had spectacular views all around.  The bad part about the views on top of Crandell is the ugly weather station and helicopter landing pad on the summit.  It made for an eye sore in my panorama summit picture.  The other times I had climbed this peak we had headed down the back west side to Crandell lake, but this time we headed down the north east ridge and came out by the ranger station.   We then had a short stroll back to the vehicle and then on to Wieners of Waterton for supper!

Cloudy view we had just above Bear's Hump

I think I took 100 different pictures of Waterton Lake today

Me on the way up

I love how the sun reflected off the lake today

That is Tanner on top of that peak

Nearing the top, this was one of the many false summits of Crandell

Blazing a trail in the snow

Mt. Blakiston off in the distance

Finally a view of the true summit (left of center)

Another view and picture of Waterton Lake

Beautiful view of Sofa, Vimy Boswell, Chief and Cleveland

Trying to navigate the snowy ridge

Finally at the top

Not much of a Cairn

Blazing a trail on the way down

Another great view and now the Prince of Wales hotel is in view!

Never noticed the flood plain drainage before, kind of neat looking from above

Snow getting a little less as we descended

Frozen waterfall on the way down

Looking back where we had come, that snowy ridge is the North east ridge of Crandell where we came down

Sun set behind the mountains

Map My Hike Track of Hike (lost signal for last little bit)

Panorama on Summit

2nd Panorama on Summit

Video on Summit



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