*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

July 08, 2017

Mt. Clements July 5, 2017

Today was a very hot day and quite the adventure.  I continue my non-Waterton hiking and Glacier is truly a beautiful area just to the south.  So today we had hopes of doing Clements and Canon, the stuff I looked at online said it was do-able but things changed today.  We started up the Hidden Lake trail and one member of our party said he hear there is a short cut if we go up the face of Clements.  Well that is where it all went south.  So for the next 3-4 hours we spent trying climb that very face.  We did some pretty sketchy climbing.  I'm no expert at classes of hiking but others in the group said it was a solid class 4.  Eventually we decided for our safety to turn back descend the mountain and go the original route intended.  But since we had lost so much time we were only able to bag one peak today and it was Clements.  The rest of the hike was pretty straight forward and the views from the top were spectacular.  There was even ice still on Hidden Lake.  We returned home a little later than usual and a little more sun burned too.  Also in hindsight later that night there was an earth quake that registered at 5.8 in Montana that I felt as I was getting to bed that night.  The bed shook for about 5 seconds and I though that I was glad I wasn't on the cliff face when that happened because who knows what would have happened if the quake had hit while we were there.

Our view of the Summit in the morning

There was still a tonne of snow on the Hidden Lake Trail

The beginning of our sketchy hiking the snow got pretty steep before we got on the even steeper rocks

Starting up the cliffs

First great view of Hidden Lake, we looked down on it all day and by the end the ice almost halved in area, hot day!

Some of our sketchy side-hilling trying to find a way up

Trying another spot, but still couldn't find a good route up

This patch of snow is visible in the middle of the cliff face pictures so you can we where we got too.  We got about 30 meters higher than this snow patch

Deciding to descend

This was the sweet goat trail we took on the summit ridge, if you are afraid of heights this wouldn't have been easy

Another view looking back on the sweet goat trail, Canon our other goal not attained in the distance

Summit group picture

Father and son picture

Heading down, the sweet goat trail is around this hump on the right side

Hidden Lake view from the summit

See the little patch of snow (little white dot) in the middle, we got on the ledge about 30 meters above that


Panorama on Summit




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