Bears Hump

Anyone who has ever been to Waterton will be very familiar with Bears Hump. Bears Hump is actually one end of Crandell Mountain and overlooks the town site. It is a short but very steep hike. I believe it is only three quarters of a mile long so you can be at the top in less than half an hour. Kira hiked bears hump this summer with some of my brothers and sisters at a reunion that I never made it to. She took a bunch of pictures so I will share some of them with you. The other pictures I just pulled off the internet. The picture above is of Kira with Evan standing on Bears Hump. Vimy Mountain is in the background. The upper lake is on the the right and the lower lake is on the left. As kids, Lester and I hiked bears hump so many times that I wouldn't even try to count them. Eventually it became so mundane that we had to spice things up a bit so one day when Lester and I were on top of bears hump we decided to heck with the trail and we climbed down the face of it.
If you look at the pictures on the left Crandell Mountain is to the right and the hump on the very left of the mountain is "Bears Hump". The normal trail comes up from the more gentle right side but we decided to head down the left side. Looking at bears hump from the town site it looks pretty darned steep. Let me tell you, when you're climbing down the face it looks even steeper. I remember we were walking along a ledge that was no more than a foot wide and the ledge suddenly came to an end. It started up again just a foot or two further along but when you're looking straight down for fifty to a hundred feet taking a step across an empty gap even just a foot or two away is pretty daunting. We did make it down just fine and came out of the tree's near the highway heading up to Cameron Lake.

If you expand the picture of the townsite by double clicking on it you can see our motels. They are the ones with the red roofs. Kira zoomed in closer in the next picture to help you see the motels better.

After we go hiking Lester and I learned early on to always check for wood ticks. They were so common that we would get vaccinated for Lyme disease every year. It was normal to find a wood tick or sometimes a couple but I remember after this hike I had some where around fifteen wood ticks on me. It was kind of freaky. Have you heard all the old wives tales about how to get a wood tick to come out of your skin once they've burrowed in? Well I've tried them all and none of them work. One theory said that if you hold a lit match near their rear end they will come out. Didn't work. Another theory was that if you cover them with vegetable oil they can't breath and they will back out. Didn't work, it just died. The only thing we were able to do was to play with them until their head popped off and then we had to dig out the head like it was a splinter.

This view is looking south from Bears Hump at the upper Waterton Lake. About half of the lake is in Montana.






Kira took this picture of Crandell Mountain from Bears Hump.

















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