works of wanderlust

Category: travel tales

  • Day Hike to Troll Falls

    Springtime in the mountains is unpredictable. It could be sunny. It could be snowing. It could blow in with a thick fog and lock the world into a magical claustrophobia inside the vastness of unseen towering rock castles.

    Our first twenty-four hours in the mountains in 2021 saw all of those types of weather here, and more. We’re in the mountains for a short spring getaway, including some spring-slash-winter walks in the wilderness to refresh our souls for the upcoming adventure season.

    Adventure Journal.

    We woke to a spitting rain that was trying it’s darnest to be a snowfall, but by breakfast the weather had settled into a mere hazy overcast sky. Just down the road from our hotel (no camping for us this time of year!) was the trailhead to a short day hike into the woods to a waterfall we’d visited a few months ago in warmer days.

    Troll Falls is a popular easy hike for all ages. In fact, we saw as many dogs and kids on the woodsy walk as we saw adults. And we brought one of each… to be fair.

    There is some story behind where the name “Troll Falls” originates, too, and it’s linked back to the rocky cliff walls near the waterfall-proper pocked with small holes fit for the likes of the mythical trolls that might live there. I assumed they were all still hibernating during these still chilly days. I didn’t actually see any, though a deer crossed our path once.

    Leading into the woods from the parking lot, the still-frozen path led us into a sparse, bare wood.

    The trees here are a mix of pine, fir and poplar, the latter being still to early on for any sign of foliage, and the formers notoriously spartan even on a good day. Between the bare trees and the well-trod path (it is a very popular place to visit for most everyone who comes here after all) all this made for a sheltered but bright route.

    There is nothing particularly remote about the trail, though. Apart from the fact that one is out and about in the fresh mountain air and at least a hundred kilometers from the nearest city, the trailhead is a mere fifteen minute stroll from a four-star resort hotel, and the route itself traces the lower perimeter of a former Olympic ski resort. Yet for the solitude and clear mountain air one may as well be tucked into a remote valley far from civilization.

    Either way, we’ll take what we can get these days.

    It was an ideal hike for the pup, tho. At just six months old she’s had a whole checklist of new adventures over the past thirty-six hours: a four hour car ride, a visit to two new cities, an overnight in a hotel, meeting a deer, the fresh mountain air, and now a wilderness hike up to a frozen waterfall. We’ll work up to bigger things and longer adventures slowly. An hour an a half through the woods tuckered her out solid.

    The final stretch of the inbound hike brought us to the base of a small waterfall.

    In the summer we had hiked up to the upper falls which were much more spectacular, but the steep ascent and the sketchy footing in the still-frozen spring meant that the interesting portion of the trail was still closed for the season.

    Instead we crept carefully up to the foot of the frozen shards of falling water and snapped some photos at the base of the view. The cliffs all around it are only about ten meters tall, but they overhang with a teetering perspective that felt as though the whole thing could have collapsed in over us without a moments notice, snoozing trolls and all.

    Amazing.

    And as we made our way back along the icy path, the weather changed its mind yet again, the fog swelling up like a crashing wave over the nearby mountain and the snow spinning in the springtime breeze.

    A short morning adventure concluded before lunch, and just in time to beat that unpredictable weather.

  • 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.

  • March Melt in the River Valley

    So desperately am I looking forward to two things: being able to travel further than my neighbourhood and the now-six-month-old puppy being able to tackle a long hike.

    Adventure journal.

    The spring is being generous to us this year.

    Last year (and I remember this specifically because it was the first couple weeks of local lockdown and I was keenly aware of the weather and the time I spent outside because of being stuck at home) we had a slow, wet March melt.

    The snow lingered. The ice slipped up the sidewalks. Regular dustings of snow teased a late spring.

    And I didn’t yet have a six month old puppy who needed long daily walks.

    I live in a city of almost a million people, but I doubt more than ten thousand of them delve very deep at all into our local wilderness.

    The local municipal government made some smart decisions a number of years back and created a kind of zoning exclusion to private development along the river. There are some houses and properties grandfathered in, but for nearly fifty kilometers of river it is managed wilderness, threaded with asphalt paths, single track trails, foot bridges, parking access, picnic areas, and boat launches. The single connected system has been calculated to be twenty-two times the size of Central Park in New York City.

    And we live a ten minute walk from any of about six nearby access points.

    I Took the Afternoon Off.

    The dog needed a long walk as much as I did.

    We slipped into one of the lesser known river valley access points, the kind where you step onto a gravel trail between some houses tucked into the back corner of the neighbourhood, then your take the left fork away from the main trail and out into what seems to be a small strip of unused agricultural land, follow a narrow single track trail into the trees and then wander your way down a moderate descent to the main asphalt path.

    I’ve walked (or run) it a hundred times.

    It was new territory for the pup.

    And I was being cautious, of course.

    The pup is still not fully grown, and she’ll always be somewhat small. Evidence of coyote scat leftover from the winter was all over the place. I’ve seen the wild hounds out there a few times, too. She wouldn’t make much more than a snack for one of them, though they’d be fighting me tooth and nail to get ahold of her. Fortunately they didn’t seem to be lurking nearby and are generally timid critters. We’re going to have an encounter eventually, though. It’s their habitat and I built my house on it. But it doesn’t mean we don’t keep a couple pairs of eyes and ears on alert even when we’re enjoying our walk.

    The ground was squishy and the air was fresh.

    As I said he March melt has been particularly generous to us this year. The temperatures were in the mid-teens and the wispy clouds let enough sunshine through to make the day more than enjoyable, particularly after that long, long winter.

    But mounds of unmelted snow still huddled in the shady bits.

    And the ground was soft and soggy where drainage was less cooperative.

    The mud caked on my pant cuffs and also in the tuffs of fur around the pup’s ankles.

    We trekked down through my familiar route, into the valley and meeting up with the trail where more people had the same Friday afternoon idea as I.

    Five kilometers later we had circled back to the house, both tired but refreshed from the spring air, and had a small collection of photos to swipe through as we dozed together on the couch.

  • The Other End of the Rainbow

    Today is St. Patrick’s day here and I’m reminded that in 2019 I spent a weekend and a week in Dublin, Ireland.

    I break it up that way on purpose. A weekend and a week. The family and I were on a group trip with my daughter’s dance school through Scotland and Ireland. I went ahead of the group to Ireland a full weekend ahead of the rest of the group so that I could run a half marathon through Dublin. They showed up on Sunday evening and we spent another week touristing.

    I got out of the cab from my airport to the hotel and took this single photo.

    It was raining when I left Scotland and raining still when we landed at the Dublin airport.

    First impressions are often lasting.

    I’d been crammed into a RyanAir flight from Glasgow to Dublin, snagged the window so I could breath, and also breathe in the view of the lush green of the Irish countryside on our approach.

    I was travelling light. A change of clothes. Some personal kit. My running gear. A GoPro. My one small suitcase came off the luggage carousel (almost) first, and I quickstepped out into the taxi queue to find a ride to Chapelizod, a village suburb of Dublin where I’d booked my country-style hotel fit for my budget-conscious side-trip.

    My first time in Dublin. My first hour in Ireland.

    I paid the cabbie, stepped out into the small parking lot outside the hotel, and looked at the rain clouds drifting and clearing behind me to the east.

    A rainbow.

    I doubt I could have felt more of a stereotyped welcome to Ireland than a rainbow …unless perhaps a leprechaun had dashed across the street behind me.

    I snapped this selfie and sent it back to my family to let them know I’d arrived safely, checked in, and then likely went to find a pint of something.

  • Hiking: Just the Bear Necessities

    With so much closed and cancelled during the height of the pandemic, we took a couple short local vacations last summer to explore the nearby Rocky Mountain parks.

    We felt we needed another break so we’ve booked a couple more nights (in the near future) for a spring hotel getaway about five hundred meters from where I took this photo of a bear last summer.

    The thing about hiking in the mountains is that you’re probably going to see some wildlife.

    Maybe it will be just some birds flitting through the trees or a squirrel dashing across your path.

    Perhaps a larger animal of the cloven hoof variety will wander through the trees just far enough away to assert her caution into the scene.

    Or occasionally, a big old bear will be lumbering down the side of the road.

    I’ve come across bears a half dozen times on my wilderness adventures and every single time has resulted in a golden story that others want to hear. Bears, for whatever reason, are hiking adventure tale jackpots.

    I think it’s probably the blend of big critter who doesn’t have a care for what some pesky human is doing in the woods… unless of course he has all the care and could kill you if you get in his way.

    We’d been spotting bear advisory signage up and around the hotel and trails, but even so it was a bit of a shock to see this fella, a young black bear, ambling near the road leading into the trailhead parking lot one July weekend. We were preparing to hike from that same parking lot. I leaned cautiously out the car window and snapped a few photos with my iPhone, and we drove another three or four minutes down to park the car… a little rattled, a little awed.

    Luckily he was headed the other direction, and we enjoyed a couple hours in the mountain woods anyways.

    If all goes well, we’ll be hiking that same trail again inside of two weeks (and I’ll have some adventure journaling to share.) Chances are we’ll see some wildlife. Hopefully it’s still a little too early for another encounter with this guy.