Fred Laing Ridge - Mica Dam

It's a chilly one this morning. I should have brought gloves. It's cold on the hands, but it is nice out here. Beautiful. Look at those clouds. I got an early start this morning because there are thunderstorms potentially this afternoon. It said 30% chance of rain so it's beautiful and clear this morning. It looks good now. Hopefully it stays like this or at least I'm headed down if the weather does close in. Wow, what a view. That is gorgeous. There's Kinbasket Lake above the Micah Dam. Amazing. Dang, it's nice up here. Hopefully that wind noise isn't too much in the mic. Not a single other person around. Unreal. We do have a cloud over the peak right now. Northwestern most summit of Fred Lang Ridge and currently obscured by cloud. This right here is Gorge Lake. It's really beautiful in the morning light. It's pretty shallow though. It looks like about knee deep even in the middle. I wonder what this is like in the springtime. Would this make a good pond skim lake? I'll have to come back next spring and check it out. It's kind of in this bowl here the north side of Fred Lang Ridge and the trail is going to then take a right climb up over on top of this ridge. That's looking down the Columbia River. Kind of a river, kind of a lake. I don't know. It's in between but it's looking down downstream below Micah Dam towards Lake Revelstoke. Gotta pinch myself because this is my backyard. Okay, there's some views now. Views to the south. We've crested the ridge. Unreal over there. Wow, what a gorgeous day. Okay, that is so nice. Look at those little puffy clouds sitting above the peak and glaciers on the horizon. Beautiful color of the water. More glaciers further down. I think I picked a spectacular day for this hike. Spectacular. I'm so stoked to be here right now. Amazing. So glad I came up here. The sun feels so good. I had to put the jacket on as the wind was so cold. A bitingly cold wind. One of the things I fear is if I have this lapel mic on is that you're just going to hear my heavy breathing. My lungs gulping for more oxygen as we climb this thing. Just peeking through the cloud layer is the true summit of Fred Lang Ridge. All right, so I did come up here to the northwest peak of Fred Lang to see the views of Kinnbasket Lake. I don't think I've seen Kinnbasket Lake from such a high vantage point before. And it is gorgeous. The clouds are swirling around below me. I got blue skies above me. The sun feels warm even though the air has a freezing bite to it. It's very fresh up here. I'm going to have to name that mountain for you in the back because that thing looks really cool. I'm so glad I came up. This place is severely underrated. Yeah. What a knockout day. Knock it out of the ballpark. Here comes a cloud washing over the top right now. So I believe this summit, the northwest part of the ridge, is at 2,355 meters. The true summit's approximately 20 meters higher. Just 20 meters. And now I'm facing a decision point because I'm thinking from here I'd like to go all the way over to the highest point of Fred Lang Ridge. So that's it over there. And that means going down and up and then down and up again. And it'll double my distance for the day. But I think I'm going to do it. Look at the birds. It's a skull. I found this beautiful tarn. And I'm glad I did because I need some water at this point. Look at it. Glaciers in the back. Crystal clear water. Right here. No filter. Straight from the tarn. Oh, that's good. Absolutely beautiful area. Right here. Mr. Marmot. Mr. Horry Marmot. This is the top of Fred Lang Ridge. Behind me is Kinbasket Lake. I'm standing at an elevation of 2,373 meters. That's 7,785 feet. I came over the first peak, did a bunch of traversing up and down around this last bowl, back up onto the ridge to get up here. And it is not a very tall peak, but the views really are gorgeous. The grade in my book for this peak goes way up because how good the views are, even though, you know, it's not crazy high. I'm just taking it all in. Unreal. It's a little too nippy up here to be here in shorts at the moment. The really high peak over there got snow last night. You can see this shining white dusting on that distant peak to my southeast. Warsaw is socked in in cloud right now. It's a very cold north wind whipping down Kinbasket Lake. Probably not a very pleasant day to be out on a boat on Kinbasket Lake today. This is big bedding country, baby. Might be the northern end of the Selkirk, so I'll have to verify that. It's so cold, I'm losing fingers, losing feeling in my fingers. Nina loved it. I loved it. A lot of open subalpine rambling. And now I'm just rambling. That's a good girl. Tell me, can I interview you? What's this? Okay, so that took me just slightly less than seven and a half hours to do both peaks of Fred Lang Ridge, the southeast and the northwest. And it gets a high rating in my book because of how beautiful the views are and how seldom visited it is. It's nice to come north of Revelstoke. It is a worthwhile hike. Thanks for coming along and we'll see you in the next adventure. While in the area, I had to stop by and see Micah Dam for myself. Construction on the dam started in 1967 and it was completed six years later in 1973. At a towering height of 244 meters, this is the tallest dam in Canada, and the second tallest in North America, after the Chikwasen Dam in Mexico. The dam holds back Kinnbasket Lake, named after a chief of the Shuswap people, which stores a staggering 20.1 million acre-feet of water when full. The scale of the lake is difficult to grasp as it is so large, a surface area of 430 square kilometers, that's 170 square miles. Micah Creek Townsite was created to house the employees while constructing the dam and remains to this day. Micah Creek is one of the snowiest places in Canada, averaging a depth of 6.2 meters annually.