works of wanderlust

Month: March 2021

  • The Mystery of Big Island (Part One)

    I had other writing plans this morning, but a mystery has been unravelling in my own backyard that has piqued and diverted my interest for an upcoming summer of potential exploration.

    Backstory.

    I live near the mighty North Saskatchewan River, a twelve hundred and eighty-seven kilometer long ribbon of glacial water that flows, stretches and merges with it’s sister as it’s waters drip off the glaciers of the Rocky Mountains and eventually drain in the Hudson’s Bay.

    I can walk a mere thirty minutes from my house and dip my feet in it’s brown hued muddy waters and I often do…. though the wet-feet part is not always on purpose.

    I took this photo from a footbridge suspended under a highway river crossing. The city’s ring road cuts across the river twice, and this bridge located in the southwest is one of those spots. The bridge also marks an interesting point in the city’s remarkable river valley parks system: the south-side edge of where it is uniformly accessible. Behind me in this shot is a network of maintained asphalt trails, benches, waste bins, signage, and friendly fellow residents enjoying the the park system.

    Ahead of me, in the trees pictured, the trails look more like this second photo:

    Much of this is a mix of crown land and private property, often merging and tripping over each other in unclear boundaries. I’ve walked and run through there a few times.

    It’s as close to local bushwhacking adventure as I can get on foot and still be home for lunch.

    Big Island.

    Go back to look at that first photo.

    The wedge of trees that seems to slice across the river (where the river actually bends South a bit) is a piece of land that is called Big Island and apparently has something of a local history. You can also read more about it at citymuseumedmonton.ca.

    The green arrow highlights the view of the photo from the bridge I had referenced earlier.

    I fully admit, I’ve been curious about these parts, and have wandered through the woods with my cameras (particularly through those trails on either side of the arrow I’ve drawn on the map) looking for something interesting.

    However, renewed local chatter in the last few days that our provincial government may be working to designate Big Island as a protected provincial recreation area has me digging deeper into this mystery: the Mystery of Big Island (and why after fifteen years living so close I have never gone to check it out!)

    I think I might officially have a summer exploration project. Visit. Take some photos. Learn more about this amazing local treasure that has been hiding right under my nose.

    Stay tuned!

  • Cooking an Easy Stovetop Paella

    I want to tread carefully into the waters of writing about certain foods. Food always … always, always, always… has rich cultural roots that wrap around people and their own personal and shared histories. I respect that.

    I write this because I am aware that some (if not all) of the recipes I make and (often) write about online are steeped in the cultures of other people. And I share these recipes, writing about them here and other places, simply to express the joy I’ve been given in learning to cook those things (and then sharing the results with my family.) It is a way for me to attempt to honour and more deeply understand those cultures, and hopefully pass along that respect. It also makes me long to visit the homelands of these dishes and see how accurately the recipes have traversed time and distance to reach me here in the middle of the Canadian prairies.

    For example, Paella.

    To me Paella is a dish that feels like it has deep cultural roots, well-known and tracing back through Spanish origins.

    We inherited a paella recipe somewhere along the way that recipe has become a regular staple in our kitchen. It’s one we thoroughly enjoy making and eating even though I cannot lay claim to even a single drop of Spanish blood in my veins.

    Our Paella Recipe

    1mL saffron
    1mL salt
    1mL paprika
    500g boneless skinless chicken thighs (chunked)
    150g chorizo     sausage (chunked)
    1 whole red bell pepper (diced)
    1 medium yellow onion
    1 tablespoon of minced garlic
    2 tablespoons fresh parsley
    1 teaspoon tomato paste
    1 cup Arborio     rice
    125mL (cheap) white wine
    175mL chicken stock
    olive oil for pan

    The broth and the saffron need to come together for a start.

    The chicken then needs to be browned, and separately sweat the onion and pepper. I do this in batches in the same four quart braiser and everything turns out just a little nicer.

    The veggies all in the pan, the tomato paste and garlic should be mixed in and fried up together to coat. Shortly after drop in the rice and let that coat up and come together with everything else in the pan. These two steps shouldn’t take more than a couple minutes.

    The saffron broth, wine, water, spices, chorizo, and cooked chicken now all go into the pan, come to a light boil, and then are simmered while covered to let the rice cook. You may need to stir this every five minutes or so just so the rice doesn’t get too crunchy on the bottom of the pan.

    Stir in the parsley when the rice is cooked and let it stand for a few minutes to set up before serving.

    This becomes a rich and delicious one-pan meal and it definitely makes me hope that some day I’ll find my way to Spain to compare it to a more traditionally authentic version of the recipe.

  • Sundog

    The horizon-hugging sun of autumn and spring passing through the crisp, frosty air often whistles to her a pair of trusty companions: sundogs.

    SUNN - dawg

    Simply, sunlight refracting through ice crystals in the clouds creating a lens or halo effect in the sky.

    Listed among my favourite words is sundog.

    We had finished our recent Sunday Run and had gathered (socially distantly, of course) in the parking lot to chat and chatter. In the frosty sky to the east the glare of the sunlight through the wisps of clouds highlighted a pair of sundogs punctuating hours of the long spring dawn.

    With similar optical physics to how a rainbow appears, I suspect, the photons of light of our sun scatter in a predictable path as they pass through the billions of billions of microscopic ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere. The sky itself acts as though it is a miles-wide prism or lens, and the illusion that meets our eyes is a pair of visible flares approximately twenty-two degrees to the left and the right of the sun itself.

    Or more poetically, the sun tracks through these cool spring skies with her sundogs by her side and surveys the world as it thaws beneath our feet.

  • Local Adventures: Social Distancing at Spray Lakes

    International travel is still something that hasn’t quite come back to normal, but fortunately we happen to live in a province of Canada that has it’s share of tourist destinations.

    We’re spending some more there time over spring break returning to the spot where we took our first local pandemic weekend getaway back in July of 2020.

    We had gone for a drive.

    Kananaskis Provincial Park is a sprawling mountain nature preserve on the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains, touching the foothills and playing peekaboo with the city of Calgary just a few twists of the highway away.

    There are thousands of kilometers of hiking trails wending their way through bear country and hundreds of lakes, rivers, streams, waterfalls and spectacular mountain scenes speckle the landscape.

    You can see a respectable sampling of it by driving for a bit, then hiking for a while, then driving some more. Our ultimate goal was to drive the full loop around the hundred and fifty kilometers (give or take) back to our hotel. The route led past a number of stops, from a trailhead for a full morning strenuous hike to a couple spots where we could step out of the car for a few photos and snack at a nearby picnic table.

    Sparrowhawk Day Use Area fell into the latter category.

    A small ten-car parking lot was virtually empty as we pulled off the gravel road. A five minute wander down to the shores of the Spray Lake Reservoir led us passing by an eerily quiet assortment of empty picnic tables and cold campfire pits. On a summer day like this in any other year there would have been cars lined up along the road for lack of parking, and dozens of motor-less recreational boats exploring the lake. The din of families enjoying this place would have hidden the absolute stillness with which we were instead greeted.

    We walked along the shore for a while The kid skipped some stones into the still water. A canoe, far across the water, almost tracing the distant shore, was the only human movement besides us.

    I took some photos of the lake, and this one too, looking North towards where the dam sits, up past the bend and at the foot of those faraway mountains. The water almost like glass in the late morning calm.

    The ultimate in socially distanced places where no one else seemed to even exist.

  • Focus: Low Angle Perspectives Bring Visual Interest to Snapshots

    Regular readers may have noticed that I often include my own photos with many of my daily blog posts. It’s not an accident that I often have a pretty great shot to accompany something that I’m writing about, or have actually just sat down and written about a photo that I liked.

    This is because I count photography among the most consistent of my hobbies.

    There are so many tips and tricks that photographer use to make their shots more visually interesting, and many of those do not require any special equipment. On this meta Monday I thought I’d dig a little deeper into that.

    One example of a simple trick is just this: adjusting your perspective.

    A ground-level shot of a puppy walking on a leash.

    How often have you come back from vacation and sorted through the hundreds of photos you’ve taken and, while you may have many beautiful shots, you also felt a little blah about the snapshot style that you stuck with for the whole trip?

    The thing about cameras is that whether you are using something with an eyepiece or a screen, we so often hold them up to our face-level to snap.

    But hot tip: your face is not actually part of the photo-taking process. In fact, it may be contributing to that underwhelmed feeling that comes with mundane snapshots.

    I think as humans we tend to find engaging things that seem familiar but are just a little bit askew. When you take a snapshot, the scene, angles, perspectives are all familiar, but the photo isn’t as engaging as it could be because it’s almost too normal.

    When the scene seems a little bit too normal, I often find myself crouching down, setting my camera on or close to the ground, or even just holding the camera near a hip, A simple change of the angle of the photo can create a photo with an unusual line of sight into a scene that is something our eyes are used to seeing all the time.

    This off-kilter perspective can make visual interest and that can often lead you to a great photograph.