So I realize I haven't actually told you guys about the hike yet. I've been busy, but there's another reason... the hike kicked our collective butts.

This was our first hike of the season. We've been too busy with home stuff and just didn't get a chance to get out before last weekend.

Since it was our first hike, we didn't want to do anything challenging. After all, we hadn't been in the mountains since last August - almost a year. We also wanted to take a trail that would have ample water sources, since we were taking Cayce along on the first hike of her life.

We decided on Memorial Lakes, which is a chain of three lakes, each higher than the other. It was (at the time we thought) rated moderate, and was supposed to be a 6-7 hour return trip.

An aside: We were really looking forward to taking Cayce on the hike. She's a bundle of energy, so we figured she'd do just fine. The only concern we had was how she was going to behave in a new house, with two kids. Turns out, she does just fine; the kids loved her, as did our friend Aida's mom, who is visiting Canada from Yemen (and absolutely *loves* Cayce). We were also a little worried about taking her on a 3 hour car ride. When we first got her, she'd get carsick after a few minutes... thankfully, she did just fine.

Back to the story... We got up at 6 on Friday morning, and quietly headed out of Calgary to Canmore. About 7:30, we arrived in the Ribbon Lake Day Use Area parking lot, and started getting ready for our hike. Note the time.

We got all our gear on, our feet taped up, hooked the dog up to her leash, and the leash up to Kirsten, and started wandering down the main trail to Ribbon Lake. Our trail was supposed to branch off about 40 minutes along the trail... but we couldn't find it.

After about a half hour of trying to find the trailhead, I broke out a topo map for the area. The trail looked like it passed within 100 meters of the east side of a creek we were close by; we'd seen a trail heading in the right direction, but it was on the west side of the creek... We took it anyway, assuming that we'd cross over at some point.

And we did. Just not as part of the trail. About 30 minutes in, we knew we weren't on the right trail. But we did know that the trail we should be on was close... so we found a log that had fallen across the creek, and shimmied over it to get to the other side. We found the right trail about 20 feet away, hidden by a row of trees.

Now that we were on the right trail, and not bushwhacking through the forest, the going got a little easier... We managed to find our way to the first lake and stopped to let the dog have a swim.

Though she's a superstar at swimming in the Saskatchewan River, it turns out she can't (won't) swim in a lake. Go figure.

We made our way towards the second lake, stopping to take in a beautiful little canyon the creek has carved into the rock. After negotiating our way around a huge tower of rock (Bogart Tower), we found ourselves at the second lake.

Now here's where things started to get a little sketchy. The guidebook was very clear about missing the first gulley, and taking the second. I could see two gulleys. The first looked relatively nice and navigable. The second was a field of talus and scree. It mentioned that the trip to the third lake was "an athletic 20 minutes."

The second gulley really didn't look all that hospitable, but the first could have hidden some pretty gnarly terrain (much of it was hidden from below).

But, I thought to myself, the guidebook says to take the second gulley. And who am I to disagree with the guidebook?

We took the second gulley. For the next hour or so. The going was pretty tough, and there was a lot of sliding and hating the day Darren was born going on. Even Cayce, with her four-wheel drive was having trouble getting up the slope. At one point Kirsten suggested the title for this writeup: "I didn't expect that rock to move."

But, we did eventually make it to the top of the cirque, and looked down into the third lake. Of course, we were supposed to arrive at the third lake. We'd travelled too far west and arrived on a ridge overlooking the lake.

We stopped and had some lunch, and the dog (much to my surprise) fell asleep. After a brief rest, I convinced Kirsten to wander down to the lake, and she stayed on the near shore while I clambered over talus to see the Memorial Cairn.

We'd spent 7 hours getting to this point.

And our troubles were far from over. On the way back down, we managed to get off the trail after the second lake.

See, the thing about talus is that there's no discernable trail. Now, normally, this is handled through the use of cairns. The problem was that either very few cairns were used, or they had been knocked down. (Of course, we neglected to make our own cairns along the way as well). Another problem was that we couldn't remember where we'd crossed the stream before heading to the second lake.

All we knew is that we had to head East. I could see the first lake from our position, and could get a bearing from Bogart Tower, so I knew where we were within a couple of hundred feet... Upon Kirsten's suggestion, we stuck close to the creek and bushwacked through to the first lake.

And ended up on the wrong side.

And found fresh (within an hour) grizzly droppings.

Now here's something you might not know. Dogs and bears don't always get along. And bears will often follow dogs. Since the first lake, we had taken Cayce off the leash. Climbing over rock is just too difficult and dangerous with a dog attached to you; besides, we were in an open area before this point, and could see anything coming from a good half-kilometer away.

As soon as we found the grizzly droppings, we got Cayce on the leash.

There was still a problem though.... we were on the wrong side of the lake. We knew we didn't want to backtrack - since we were at the shore of the lake, we knew the grizzly was somewhere behind us. There was only about 15' from our shore to the closest shore of the lake (the side we needed to be on), and the lake was only about 2' deep. So we did what any tired, lost, afraid-of-grizzly hikers would do... we jumped into the lake and waded to the other side.

The rest of the way was fairly uneventful. We were able to stick to the trail the rest of the way back, and eventually found where the trail should have been marked on Ribbon Lake trail. We had some flagging tape, so we marked the trail more clearly for future hikers.

We trudged back to the car, meeting a group of young, overly-happy hipsters who were heading up to Ribbon Lake for a campout. And finally, at 8:00pm, we got back to our car.

I'll save you the math on this one: our 6-7 hour hike took us 12 1/2 hours. I haven't felt that bad about a hike since the last time we strayed 34km off-course, and took a 13 hour hike.

We didn't go back for another hike that weekend.

The guide listed this hike (on review) as being made for hikers who are "tough as old beef jerky". After our experience, taking the harder trails, we decided that we're old beef jerky made by a mean old German butcher.