works of wanderlust

Category: running & adventure

My sport involves feet and trails and moving one quickly across the other.

  • autumn running

    I don’t abide much my astrological mumbo jumbo but Sagittarius that I am has seemed to inclined me to a love of autumn—the cool weather, the orange-tingted palette, the crunch of leaves on the trail beneath my feet.

    We stumbed into a trail run this past weekend. It wasn’t an intense mountain ultra by any means, but in attempting to keep out of the cool October winds early on Sunday morning we ducked into the shelter of the trees and woodier areas adjacent to our more regular running routes and spared little reluctance to dive headlong into hitherto unexplored diversions from the same. 

    That is to say, we knew there was some single track through the little suburban creek that cleaves between our little suburban corner of the city and the greater metropolis but they tended to be trails we ignored in favour of either more serious training or longer, more serious running adventures.

    But it was Thanksgiving morning, there was a fresh box of it-was-someones-birthday pastries waiting back at the coffee shop where we run, and we were looking at something short and simple and let’s just get it done today and go have a coffee, okay?

    The leaves crunching, the colours on the ground and in the trees, and the whole autumn vibe if I’m being honest—it all inspired me to pull out my phone and record some improptu footage of the run. I held the camera ahead of me as I dashed through the trees and dodged obstacles. 

    If autumn seems like a long season, here on the Canadian prairies we are often lucky to get more than a week.

    By next weekend the air will have chilled a bit more, the leaves will be detritus on the ground surrounded by a million bare branches. There could even be snow—it’s a coin flip. 

    So instead we enjoy the trails in the moment, for a moment, and dig our winter gear from storage for another cold season as our autumn running seasons blinks past in a blur of orange and red and brown.

  • country fly, city fly

    Atop a mountain this past summer, backcountry camping for three nights an eight hour hike from civilization, I spent an hour each day keeping up my writing by scribbling narratives of our daily advenutres into my smartphone. This is one of my entries.

    day two

    Anyone in search of an example of modern evolutionary pressure look no further than the common fly. 

    Back in the city, like up high in the mountains, flies are ubiquitous.

    But unlike the mountains, the cities are filled streets, buildings, parks and coffee shops full of people.

    City flies need to be smart and fast.  Any fly that is not keenly aware of its surroundings and has not the instinctual inclination to leap into the air and off into the safety of flight is doomed to be swatted by any of a million people. Flies are not be dullards, and any fly born without the inbuilt drive to flee is unlikely to survive long enough to pass on its disadvantageous genome to a future generation.

    We will have spent nearly three days up high in the backcountry camping in the mountains where a million variety of insects thrive. In fact even high up above the tree line where even in mid-August patches of snow remain in the share of large rocks, there are so many flies that an adventure-seeker is bound to spend as much time swatting away bugs as admiring the views. And it struck me as curious—though probably less so for the fly which I smacked dead upon my bare forearm—that there must be significantly less pressure, evolutionarily speaking of course, for mountaintop flies to carry a genome that knows better than to get smacked by a human—which a fly may rarely, if ever, see in its short life on the side of a mountain—than for one of its city cousins who encounter humans as a matter of course and have no such luxury as to leisurely investigate a bare forearm on a Friday afternoon.

    Nearly every fly I encountered up on that mountain was indifferent to the risk of sudden death carried by my swiftly moving hand. Nearly every fly sat patiently and still as I reached over and snuffed it away.

    Smacking a city fly requires speed and agility on the part of a human, but one feels superhuman atop a mountain as the dull flies understand too little what awaits the looming shape and shadow of a hand moving towards them.

    Evolution at work.

  • cliffs and ladders

    Atop a mountain this past summer, backcountry camping for three nights an eight hour hike from civilization, I spent an hour each day keeping up my writing by scribbling narratives of our daily advenutres into my smartphone. This is one of my entries.

    day one

    The logic of the warning signs which were hung at either end of that certain section of trail suggesting the use of safety gear was irrefutable. That fact was doubly logical as I clung for dear life to the side of a cliff wall with nothing but the tension of my fingers and a tenuous trust of the laws of physics on my side.

    We had been hiking for literal hours, always aware that somewhere up ahead we were due flute an encounter with a technical section of trail that would bring us face to face with a climb requiring hand over hand up a series of angled steel bars pounded into the cliff face. A steel cable ran parallel to the mountain ladder, it self bolted at intervals into the same rock and intended for that aforementioned safety gear.

    Seasoned hikers would have carried helmets and harnesses and used a double-caribeener system tethering them to the cable as they climbed. Carefully they would scale the fifty of rungs always tied to a line to catch them if they fell.

    We free climbed.

    And to boot we were carrying weighty backpacks stuffed with all the gear and food we would need to camp for three days on the mountain. So I, fifty pounds heavier on my feet and being perpetually tugged backwards clung to the bars and took them as best I could, one ring at a time. One false move, one misplaced step, and I could have, would have, fallen not just to the starting point of our climb but a further hundred meters of the lower edge and onto the jagged rocks below. If you suspect I am exaggerating for effect, let me be clear that if anything I am failing to convey the deadly seriousness of this particular section of nature hike.

    My fear of heights kicked into overdrive and with sweaty hands and shaking legs and a heartbeat that would rival my run training sprints, I clambered to the top and all but kissed the ground.

    For what it’s worth, we’re taking a different route down to complete the loop and I’m pretty sure there are no mountain ladders.

  • Local Adventures: Hiking Jura Creek

    It’s a long weekend in Canada and so with neither work nor school for anyone on Monday we skipped off to the mountains for some nordic-style fun in the alpine climate.

    We travel out there quite often. To relax. To hike. To just be somewhere beside home.

    And we always try to squeeze in at least one hike, though hiking in the winter is often a bit more challenging than hiking in the summer.

    The week before we left town I hunted down three pairs of crampons, over the shoe ice spikes with steel grips two centimetres deep and enough grip to walk us up any icy path the tourist-grade hiking scene could throw at us.

    So we bundled up, packed some snacks and water, stuffed a couple cameras in my backpack, and drove about fifteen klicks out of Canmore to an off-the-beaten-path trailhead for Jura Creek.

    In the summer, I assume, Jura Creek is a flowing mountain creek washing down the side of a mountain. The creek bed, frozen during out visit, made for a great short day hike in winter. We hiked up through the water channel, climbing up and over a few small rocks and then out into an open vista with views of the mountains around us.

    Jura Creek is apparently named for the false “jurassic” fault line that greets anyone who is able to hike the approximately four klick gradual climb to the first waypoint. As it turns out it is neither a fault line nor appropriately attributable to the jurassic era. Instead, the rock formations which resemble an exposed fault are something else entirely, including a layer of ash from some ancient volcano. It was still pretty, though.

    We made the round trip, grateful as always to be back at our car, and refuelled back in town with some local amber-coloured recovery fluid.

    Check it out if you’re ever in Canmore.

  • vision, start line

    Since my modest and cautious update on my knee injury a couple weeks ago, I’ve actually been making some measurable progress in both healing and beginning my re-training.

    Then a few days later I went to a tour showing of the Banff Film Festival.

    I’m not clever enough to make a proper film, but I do think I have an interesting story to tell as I recover and train for Chicago in October.

    So I made a video:

    VIDEO REDACTED

    The first of a series, I hope. The introduction to a happy conclusion, that too.

    It’s a commitment to try and publicly document something difficult like training for a marathon. But it also commits me to training and trying harder to compete the story.

    It’s gonna be a crazy year!

    Check it out and give it a like to help me get some interest.