works of wanderlust

Tag: mountains

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • new old older


    young green leaves, rooted into
    rough hewn stump, anchored upon
    rich forest soil, draped across
    cragged heavy stone, wedged along
    ancient sweeping mountains, jutting from
    shifting geological faults, slipping around
    revolving green orb, floating in
    vast mysterious universe

    – bardo

    I have reserved some space on this blog each week to be creative, and to post some fiction, poetry, art or prose. Writing a daily blog could easily get repetitive and turn into driveling updates. Instead, Wordy Wednesdays give me a bit of a creative nudge when inspiration strikes.

  • Book: Handbook of the Canadian Rockies

    I don’t buy many paper books these days, so I caught even myself off guard when I dropped fifty bucks on this doorstop-grade loaf while on vacation over the summer, and in a souvenir store no less.

    We had spent the day in the wilderness and flipping through the pages it caught the dangling threads of my vacationing soul and pried open my wallet.

    I had woken that same morning and gone for an eight kilometer trail run up the side of a small mountain to an overlook of the town where we were staying. I’d met a friend (who had moved out to there a few years back for career reasons) and she’d led me on a 7am (and two degrees Celsius in July!) run along a quiet road and up towards the trailhead of a short day hike path that was still quiet of all human life save us. We ascended a few hundred meters of elevation into the early morning crisp air and stood on a smooth boulder with a vista view spanning what seemed fifty kilometers in multiple directions, and I couldn’t help but feel a pang of envy that she could go up there any time she wanted and I was due to drive back to the city the next day.

    Flipping through the display copy of Handbook of the Canadian Rockies by Ben Gadd that evening evoked some overlapping emotions I’d been feeling from that whole week-long excursion into the National Parks, but in particular tugged at my heart in the same sort of way that standing atop a small mountain did at the dawn of that day.

    A few minutes later I was standing at a cash register, tapping my debit card on the kiosk and watching my own copy being handed back to me with a crisp little receipt bookmark protruding from the edge.

    When I was a lot younger I was fascinated by the kinds of books that were stuffed with bounties of information, the kind of books like encyclopedias or almanacs that could surprise you with any visit. Those kinds of books you pry open to a random page and are greeted with a sub-sub-heading of some curious topic and you just read.

    This is that kind of book.

    I opened the book three times at random as I started to write this paragraph and on those three visits I was greeted with a page filled with information about local lichen species, then a page detailing the dietary habits of the mule deer, and finally a two-page spread timeline of the major geological events of the area dating back a few billions of years.

    If that kind of thing isn’t your style, you’re probably also not the kind of person to feel pangs of wonder at the beauty of a particular rock formation or pause in the middle of a long hike to contemplate a small copse carpeted by lush green moss.

    A month later I’ve consistently kept this book on my nightstand and made something of a habit of opening the book at random (if not every day) a few times per week and reading a few pages here or there about the history, flora, fauna, and geology of my nearby mountain escape…

    …and then pining to be back there.

    If that isn’t an endorsement for a book, I don’t know what is.

  • Half Ha Ling

    This month marks a year and a half since our local area got caught up in the global pandemic that, among many other things, made world travelling near impossible.

    We’ve made up for this by trying to find some room between the bad news, ever-shifting-work-life, and many cancelled plans to get away on some local escapes.

    This summer was no exception, and over my blogging break we found ourselves in Canmore, a small town nestled into the Eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains, where numerous small adventures were had, including a certain last minute attempt to climb a very tall mountain.

    Stand on the main street of Canmore, Alberta and look towards the towering range of mountains standing to the south of town and you wont help but see a prominent jag of rock protruding high into the sky, standing with a sentry-like pride over the valley below.

    That peak had borne many names over the years and stirred it’s share of controversy for the same, but locals now almost uniformly refer to it as Ha Ling Peak.

    We spent the better part of a full week in Canmore in July.

    We’d rented a small hotel room near the center of town.

    We wandered on foot to grab groceries or breakfasts or beer or silly thing tourists buy when they visit small towns on vacation.

    We loaded up the car to drive into the wilderness to tackle family-friendly hikes with the puppy and the teenager.

    We hiked, relaxed, and ate, avoiding the heat and smoke as much as possible, while trying to make the best out of a local vacation in an admittedly beautiful place to be trapped during a global lockdown.

    On the last night of our trip, sitting on a patio eating an early dinner, looking down that same main street, my wife asked me if I’d done everything I’d wanted to on our little family getaway.

    ”I’d like to climb Ha Ling … someday.” I replied. “But I guess we’re out of time.”

    Most people set aside a full day, starting early to climb to the eight hundred meter saddle, and a further slog up to the summit and peak. It was just after five pm and we had at best four hours or daylight left.

    “How far could we get tonight?” She asked.

    ”I’m staying at the hotel with the dog.” The teenager objected.

    ”We could go up as high as we can and give ourselves an hour to come back down before sunset.” I suggested.

    Shortly after six my wife and I were standing at the trailhead in our hiking boots.

    There are inherent risks in trying a new trail of moderate difficulty outside of the normally travelled hours. If something goes wrong while you are up and alone on a mountain with an encroaching night… well, that’s bad news.

    We knew we wouldn’t reach the summit, but being fit and adventurous we gave ourselves two hours to go up as far as we could then come back down. We agreed: we’d hike until my GPS watch read exactly one hour then we’d turn around and hike back down leaving a good thirty to forty-five minutes of cushion for the sun to set behind the mountains.

    And off we went.

    About thirty minutes in we’d reached the first viewpoint.

    At exactly an hour I could see the second a hundred meters or so ahead on the path.

    We reached the half way point up the mountain and a few minutes over the half way point of our agreed time. We took a blurry selfie with light failing on the the smoky vista behind us. And we hiked back down along the slippy path, found the car, and were back at the hotel before the last sliver of sun had vanished behind the rocky crags in the distance.

    It may have only been half a goal but it was easily a full adventure.

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