*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

September 08, 2018

Chief Mountain September 3, 2018 Glacier National Park

Today we decided to hike Chief Mountain.  The smoke from the recent forest fires was less these last few days so I figured we ought to go hiking this labor day Monday.  Our group headed up early, we had obtained the necessary permits to hike this mountain.  Our day started windy but nice and sunny and clear.  At points the wind was almost unbearable but we forged on.  Eventually we made it to the top and we had feared earlier that the wind might blow us off the top.  Luckily for us it had calmed down a little and once we reached the summit it was almost gone.  However with no wind came cooler weather and a cloud cover rolled in.  As we headed down the cloud was pretty thick and so thick we had to stay together as a group because we couldn't see each other for more than about 30 feet. The fog was so thick that the may reason we were able to find out way out was because of the track I had on my phone, we basically followed that on our return.  It would have taken us alot longer to find our way out without that gps track, thank goodness for technology.  Anyways, great day and a great hike.

Start of our day, what a great iconic mountain!

This is truly the mountain everyone in southern Alberta needs to climb because it is the most recognizable mountain on the horizon

Great views into the Belly River area

My son climbed this huge rock for a great photo op

Ninaki on the back side of the mountain

Our first views of the backside

The scree slog up the back

Looking back at Ninaki

Slowly making our way up

View of the summit from the false summit

Looking down as we traversed to the summit

First view of the chair we found on top, someone had actually brought up a chair to the summit, awesome!

The clouds starting to roll in

On the chair, relaxing

Our summit photo

We raised my son on the chair to the summit with some antlers...coming of age experience!

Heading down with the fog rolling in

On the false summit with the fog all rolled in up against the front of the moutain

Looking towards the Summit with all the cloud cover on the left

This was near the false summit, luckily we didn't loose our way up there!

Thick fog like this is what we had most of the way back to our vehicles

Same picture as the first except the difference is you can't see the mountain at all




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