*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 14, 2018

Red Eagle Mountain Glacier National Park June 20, 2018

Well this was a long disappointing day.  We never reached the true summit but we attained a fairly amazing false summit that for now we will consider as a summit to make me feel better. We left really early and made the border at the usual 7am.  We started on the trail early as well, but didn't realize the approach was going to be so long.  It was over 10km till we started up the mountain.  We did pass some pretty falls, and since it had rained the days before the brush on the trail got us pretty wet.  Once we started up the mountain we realized how much energy we had expended on the 10 km approach and the route finding up the mountain was slow and eventually we got high enough that we saw a high point thinking it was the true summit later to realize it wasn't the true summit.  Out big group for the day divided and a party of us tried to get over to the true summit but eventually realized if we went any further we would miss the border crossing and our day would be very late upon return.  So we turned back from the true summit probably within 45 minutes of reaching it.  We were exhausted and figured after over 8 hours of hiking we were not going to reach the summit and be able to make our return in time to catch the border.  We settled for the false summit which in my opinion probably had better views down on St. Mary's Lake.  So we descended a different route and eventually after some bushing at the end we got back on the trail and enjoyed??? our 10km return to the vehicle.  We started hiking at 8am and finished hiking at 10:30pm (14.5 hours of hiking for a false summit???) and after all that we still missed the border crossing at Carway and had to drive to Coutts to get back home at almost 3am.  What an adventure eh!

Bear Grass at the beginning, this area had a fire a few years back and the regrowth is in full swing

Virginia Falls 

Beautiful clear morning, there is a picture near the end of this same view but at like 10pm

It was about here we started to climb up

A moose we saw went for a swim

Big frog we saw on the way up

Our initial scramble was pretty steep bu the views behind us were awesome

We eventually got high enough to see over to Logan's Pass

View kept getting better

And better

This is our first view of the false summit we thought was the summit.  This was our attained summit for the day

We couldn't get enough of the view down the lake today

That is the true summit

Heading over the ridge to the true summit

This is where we realized we better turn back, we were pretty tired at this point too

False summit view was amazing

False summit view looking towards the prairie

Summit Photo

On our way down

I loved the sun reflecting on the lake

Great tree picture

Our bush at the end before we regained the trail was kind of a pain

The same view earlier was quite different!

Picture taken right as we were ending our hiking for the day

Panorama on False Summit

False Summit Video

Track of Hike



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