Category: travel tales

  • Sculpting Sand & Polar Vortexes

    The cold is breaking.

    Where I live in Edmonton, Canada, a small city of about a million people in the middle of the Canadian prairies, it gets cold. Yet, even a stretch of brutal chill is mostly unusual. A polar vortex as they called it, where we’ve not had a day this month where the temperatures have been warmer than minus twenty degrees, has given us a February locked in our houses avoiding the bone-chilling cold even while we’re locked in our houses avoiding the pandemic.

    But it is supposed to warm up today. A little. Minus twelve, the forecast promises.

    Still, I’ve been dreaming of warmer places.

    A few years ago, we spent ten days in Maui.

    Exploring.

    Eating good food.

    Playing on the beach.

    Maybe it was because sitting on a beautiful beach in Hawaii is such the opposite of where I am now, land-locked in a frozen city, I saw this picture and I was pleasantly reminiscent of tropical vacations on this particular Travel Tuesday.

    The quality of this photo was not brilliant, but was one of dozens I took with my sun soaked sports camera after spending a hours snorkelling in the reefs, playing in the waves, and building elaborate sand castles.

    The sand castles were my particular favourite. Between my then-nine-year-old daughter and I we would construct elaborate buildings, tiny temples, and sprawling relic-inspired courtyards with the collection of plastic sand tools we’d bought at the local ABC Store. And as we dove back into the salt water we would watch from afar to see how many people would stop to look or even take photos of our creations.

    We can’t travel now.

    And it’s far too cold to turn the crispy snow in our front yard into similarly elaborate snow sculptures, if only because the snow doesn’t stick in those conditions.

    Yet, it doesn’t hurt to look through old photos and remember long ago vacations and wonder how and when we might spend our next day at the beach…

    How would you spend a day on the beach?

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  • Backpacking: Foggy Mountain Bridges

    In the summer of 2017 we travelled in a group of four adults and two tweens just across the Alberta-British Columbia border to the Mount Robson to climb the Berg Lake trail.

    After four nights atop the mountain, camping rough and day-hiking the area we were wet, tired and running low on supplies. The kids had been champion backpackers, helping out around camp, tolerating the rehydrated meals and composting toilets, entertaining us on the day we spent hunkered in the smallish cabin with fifty other people during a torrential downpour trying to dry our clothing, and carrying their share of the weight up and down the mountain.

    Kids being kids, they made up funny games to pass the long hours of hiking. They sang familiar and made-up songs to “scare off the bears.” And for most of the trek back down the mountain, a one-day descent of about eighteen kilometers of mixed terrain, they not only kept pace but led the whole group by a consistent distance.

    Readers who are familiar with the hike may recognize the bridge in this photo.

    From the bottom, the first third of the hike is a long, gradual climb to (and then along) a lake.

    After the lake, a rolling traversal near or on a riverbed brings hikers to a second gradual ascent to the top of a waterfall.

    Those who know the route usually break here because the next part of the hike is a steep, rocky climb with warning signage near the bottom. A switchback trail leads up through the rocks and trees with the sound of a waterfall in the distance. As a sign that one is nearing the top, this small bridge appears ahead marking that one is about to begin the final stretch towards the upper falls and the nearby campsite.

    As the tweens forged ahead on our descent, I came upon a clearing overlooking this bridge along a switchback on the trail. The pair who had been forging ahead with vigor were just standing there waiting… restingcontemplating… who can say?

  • Snowshoes on a Frozen Suburban Creek

    After a bitterly cold week the sun broke through the chill for a few hours on a recent Saturday afternoon. I met with some friends to explore a local creek, frozen and snowy, on a pair of trusty snowshoes.

    Adventure journal.

    I live in a winter city.

    It is cold, bitterly cold, freeze your cheeks frostbite cold for at least three months of the year. Nearly a million people live here. While not all of them savour the dark, chilly winters, most everyone embraces the hard reality of the climate. A hardy few revel in the snow and cold, and seek adventures unique to our northern location.

    In this winter city, I live in a suburban neighbourhood framed on three sides by preserved wilderness. Incredibly, the city has made an active planning effort to avoid development (apart from trails and bridges) of the river valley (to my west and north) and the twisting feeder creek bed (to the east).

    This means that I can access a vast ribbon of natural area on foot in fifteen. Alternatively, by driving for a mere few minutes I can find a place to park and step in.

    As the local pandemic restrictions loosened over the last week, I met some of my running crew for a snowy hike in the aforementioned creek bed.

    We wore snowshoes.

    Admittedly, these were unneccessary for ninety percent of the hike.

    Yet there seemed to be something more interesting about story called “Going Snowshoeing on a Frozen Creek” than a tale merely titled “Winter Hiking!

    The Whitemud Creek feeds into the North Saskatchewan River to the north. This is a broad, shallow river that flows east across multiple Canadian provinces and eventually drains into the Hudson’s Bay, whereas the feeder creek is a half dozen meters wide at best. Though I’ve never actually tested it I would guess I could stand in the centre in springtime and not get my shirt wet.

    The creek is frozen nearly solid by January each year, or at least solid enough to safely walk atop it. Thus, after a fresh fall of snow the creek makes for a smooth, flat course, and one boxed in on each side by an alternating combination steep banks as high as twenty or thirty meters, natural boreal forest, and a single track trail that paces through the woods that we often run in spring, summer or fall.

    By far the best part of the two hour, seven kilometer hike was time spent with three friends. I had not seen in any of them in person for over two months. Over the holidays we video chatted, texted, and shared pictures and stories. This is not the same as walking beside someone through the snow, even if they are wearing a pandemic mask.

    The ice crackled underfoot.

    We climbed like giddy kids under and around multiple fallen trees that had not yet been cleared away by municipal maintenance crews.

    We skidded across patches of bare ice on snowshoes meant for trudging through deep snow.

    The sun warmed the air with a loving apricity as we paused for breath, or conversation, or just to take in the simple natural views. Even the clean, crisp air of a suburban creek bed was a brilliant change from the hour spent hunkered down in our houses simultaneously avoiding the cold and a contagious virus.

    A winter city adventure, and a local travel adventure for a strange, frustrating year.

    I don’t think I could have traded it for a better way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

  • Skoki: Scrambling Down

    High up and nestled in a mountain valley above Lake Louise, Alberta, the Skoki trail is a moderately challenging adventure hike. Sure, you could helicopter in, and sure, you could stay at the lodge (which has hosted celebrities and royals.) Or, you can hike the distance up and over the summit, into the valley and camp rough in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains like we did in 2018.

    After three nights in the wilderness, filling our days with wandering trail exploration, circumnavigating Mount Skoki (the hazy one on the right, if I remember correctly), rehydrating our food with hand filtered river water boiled over a firefly stove all while avoiding the swarms of mosquitos, this photo was us clambering back to the trailhead where our truck was parked.

    The interesting thing about this hike is that there are multiple and roughly parallel routes in and out. While the base ten kilometers or so doesn’t vary much, the trail splits as you need to decide which path to take over the summit and into the valley behind where the campsites and lodge hide.

    We took the main route inbound which took us on a hard climb up and then a winding path down through that forested green ridge in the right of the photo.

    On the way out we followed the creek in the centre of the photo towards a pair of glacial lakes (behind me, the photographer) out of frame, that first required some tough (particularly with a heavy pack on) climbs up and between boulders to the edge of the lakes. Then, after a rest at the lakes, the hike continued up a steep ascent to a different pass over the ridge and back down to join the other trail.

    The path inbound definitely seemed easier, and the views were great, but we were also fresh and rested on day one.

    The path out was much more challenging, but the scramble beside the lakes and the pause we took overlooking a glassy glacial pool still sticks in my mind as a highlight of the trip.

  • Iceland: Chasing Waterfalls

    I snapped close to ten thousand photos over the course of not-quite-two weeks travelling around Iceland in 2014, and disproportional number of those pics included waterfalls.

    for whatever one photo is worth:

    Skógafoss is a huge waterfall on the Skógá River in the very southern bulge of Iceland. It was one of the first big waterfalls we saw on our trip along the ring road of the island and notable not just because it is an impressive waterfall, but having climbed up the slick and narrow path to overlook the crest I saw something even more interesting.

    A trailhead.

    On my visit I wasn’t carrying much more than a camera bag, but others sharing the trail with me were lugging much more substantial loads. Backpacking gear. Obvious overnighting equipment. Crampons. Warm clothes. As I turned to climb back down after snapping my photos, they were hopping over a low barrier and setting out on a serious backpacking trip.

    The Fimmvorduhals Trail (as I researched later) is one of many incredible adventures in Iceland. From what I can tell it is part of an extensive hiking and backpacking network in that country and people come from all over to walk them.

    To be perfectly honest, until I saw those people trekking outbound from where we had stopped for a tourist break, it had not occurred to me that there might be some seriously awesome backpacking to be had in Iceland. We were going to explore by car with the family including my (at the time) seven year old and her grandparents.

    To be even more honest, it hasn’t left my mind as a backpacking trip I’d love to take on. Sooner than later. Had there not been a global pandemic, it was actually an idea I’d floated with a friend for this upcoming summer to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. It inspired me to see those people setting out, and a pang of jealousy has always stuck like a splinter in my brain that I got back into an SUV and drove on while they set off into the wilds for something far more epic.

    This picture, then, as simple and beautiful as it looks is actually hiding a personal point of interest for me: it’s the trailhead of one of my bucket list hikes.