The First Trail up Ha Ling

 We have known Brian Carter for a good many years from when he first started building and improving trails around the Canmore area. He and Trailminders are most well known for the first trail up Ha Ling, then called Chinaman’s Peak.

Brian’s sketch showing some of the direct lines and his planned route

He and his granddaughter have made a short video. Brian mentioned that: The brief selfie recorded up at Quarry Lake was made after riding my mobility scooter there. It’s not surprising that it is shaky – I’m 97 years old!

To learn much more about the problems they encountered, both with the terrain and with other people read this extract from his memoirs “The Mountains Kept Calling.” 

One of the problems they encountered was a large rock slab. Here are a couple of pictures of Tony crossing the slab.

Tony crossing the slab August 1998. The logs were placed across the slab against 3 posts supported by custom-made brackets.

Tony crossing the same slab in August 2019

The project map shows Brian’s trails in yellow (not the straight-up one cutting across zigs). The new trails are in blue. Source forgotten!

Of course Brian also had a hand in other projects, most notably deciding the start of Doug Campbell’s trail up Lady Macdonald, the improvement of Grassi’s trail to the spring, the trail up EEOR,  the trail up the north ridge of Grassi Knob, and lastly, with longtime climbing partner, Leon Blumer, the ambitious Carter Route up Grotto Mountain, which made possible a traverse of the mountain.

His memoirs also detail his quite difficult climbs (we are not talking scrambling here) and his solo trips on a bike around the World. We are hoping his tales of a remarkable life will get to reach a wider audience with its publication in book form. Right now he is busy sorting photographs.

After a short illness, “Brian was released to wander the mountains” in November 2023 at age 97.