Trip Reports
Browse by objective
Every trip report, video, and GPS trace the blogs below published, grouped by the mountain it covers, so you can go straight from "where should I go" to "who has been there". Built from the blogs' own archives — see how it is built.
Kananaskis and Canmore
Close enough to Calgary to decide on the morning of.
The Front Ranges and the Forestry Trunk Road
East of the parks and mostly unpaved: the Ghost, Ya Ha Tinda, Nordegg, and the Bighorn.
The Mountain Parks
The national parks and Assiniboine, from the Bow Valley up the Icefields Parkway to Jasper.
The South
The Crowsnest, the Castle, and Waterton, continuing across the border into Montana.
West of the Divide
Over into BC: the Purcells, the Elk Valley, and the Selkirks around Rogers Pass.
Beyond the Rockies
Weekend-trip range rather than day-trip range, and a different weather regime on each.
Not yet sorted by region
Objectives whose region none of the source blogs states. They move onto a region page as soon as another blog covers them.
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Trip Reports, Blogs, and GPS Traces
A number of individuals in the community share their spreadsheets, trip reports, YouTube videos, GPS traces, and more. The by-objective pages above are built from these.
Where a blog publishes its own GPS tracks, that is marked Tracks: below — five of them do, and the form differs: four offer a file to download, Explor8ion an online map. The rest are written route descriptions and photos, with no trace to import. Sampling a handful of reports from each is how that was established, so treat it as what is usual on a blog rather than a promise about any one report.
Canadian Rockies
- Bob Spirko: Hundreds of trips going back to the 1990s, each headed with its area and date. One of the two widest archives here. Tracks: a KML and GPX zip on nearly every report.
- Explor8ion: Vern Dewit's archive, filed by region and sub-range, and the other of the two widest. Tracks: a Gaia GPS map per trip rather than a file to download.
- Sonny Bou: A sortable summit table with elevation, location, and ascent date for every trip — the single largest index on this page. Tracks: a GPX zip on many reports.
- Andrew Nugara: The author of the Nugara scrambling guidebooks, logging repeat ascents of the Castle, Crowsnest, and Waterton for two decades.
- Adam Laycock: Route notes tagged against the Kane, Nugara, and Don't Waste Your Time lists, with the lists themselves alongside.
- On-Top: Summits and hikes, each with elevation, gain, and a map pin.
- Spectacular Mountains: Strong on Kananaskis, Ya Ha Tinda, and the Ghost, plus trips much further afield. Tracks: a “download route” GPX zip on most reports, with a disclaimer worth reading.
- Peaks and Streams: Dave McMurray's reports, concentrated on the Castle, the Crowsnest, and Waterton.
- Bill Kerr: Scrambles, ski trips, and alpine climbs, sorted by activity.
- Voyageur Tripper: Detailed trip reports covering hikes and scrambles in the Canadian Rockies with route descriptions, photos, and conditions. Paid subscription required.
- Steven's Peak Bagging Journey: Steven Song's archive, and the widest coverage here of the ranges beyond the Rockies. Tracks: a “GPX DL” link on nearly every report.
- Annie Ouellet
Glacier National Park, Montana
Just south of the border, with its own community and beta:
- Glacier Mountaineering Society: A club dedicated to the mountain environment of Glacier National Park, Waterton Lakes, and the northern Rockies of Montana and Alberta — so it spans both sides of the border.
- Climb Glacier National Park: The site behind Blake Passmore's guidebook series, with route write-ups and updates.
- Peakbagger covers the Montana Glacier peaks too, not just the Alberta Rockies.
Glacier National Park, BC (Rogers Pass)
Rogers Pass and the surrounding Selkirk Range sit in BC's Glacier National Park, just west of the Rockies, and have their own dedicated beta:
Sonny Bou and Bob Spirko both reach into Rogers Pass as well, and are listed above under the Canadian Rockies.
GPS traces
Five of the blogs above publish their own tracks — Bob Spirko, Sonny Bou, Spectacular Mountains and Steven Song as downloadable GPX, and Explor8ion as a Gaia GPS map. These two are not tied to one region, and cover everything above:
- Peakbagger: the Alberta Rockies, but also Glacier National Park in Montana and much more.
- Strava
Lists
Adam Laycock publishes the four lists the community works through most often, each as a table of objectives with its region, elevation, and the guidebook's own difficulty or rating. They are his personal tick-lists, so the completion column is his — but the lists themselves are the useful part, and they are the clearest inventory of each book's contents anywhere online.
The three guidebooks behind them are described on the Guidebooks page. All four lists are folded into the region pages above: an objective on one carries a mark after its links, showing the guidebook's grade or, for the 11,000ers, the peak's elevation.
- 11000ers of the Canadian Rockies — the mountaineering list: the 58 peaks over 11,000 feet, and the long game for most people who finish the scrambling lists.
- Kane Scrambles — the scrambling list from Alan Kane's Scrambles in the Canadian Rockies, 177 objectives graded easy to difficult.
- Nugara Scrambles — the scrambling list from Andrew Nugara's More Scrambles in the Canadian Rockies, 117 objectives, and the usual next step after Kane.
- Don't waste your time — the hiking list from Don't Waste Your Time in the Canadian Rockies, 144 trips carrying the book's own verdict, from Premiere down to Don't Do.
Facebook Groups
In addition to serving as general-purpose inspirational groups, these groups can provide timely feedback in terms of trail conditions, closures, etc:
- Hike Alberta is probably the most popular Facebook group when it comes to looking for inspiration, pictures, and practical information. It is a bit of a monster in terms of volume of posts, and the approach is to give a little bit of everything for everyone.
- Wild Canadian Rocky Mountain Hikers is a popular group for advanced hikers and scramblers. The moderation team is trying their best to promote best practices and knowledge.
- Scrambling in the Canadian Rockies is a popular group among scramblers. The Scrambling in the Canadian Rockies group is for sharing trip reports and conditions, finding partners, and seeking advice related to scrambling in the Canadian Rockies.
How the by-objective index is built
The region pages above are generated from the blogs' own archives by
mise run build-trip-index, not maintained by hand, so a correction belongs upstream at
the blog or in the script rather than in the page.
Objectives are matched on an exact normalised name, which is why the same peak spelled "Albert, Mount" on one site and "Mount Albert" on another lands in one entry. Names are never merged on similarity: Explor8ion alone publishes both Mount Kitchener and Mount Michener, and both Bow Peak and Owl Peak, so anything closer than an exact match is confirmed by a person before it is merged.
Coverage is not complete, and an objective missing here has not necessarily gone unclimbed — only unindexed. Voyageur Tripper is the one source on this page left out, as it sits behind a subscription.