works of wanderlust

Tag: what a picture is worth

  • Camping: Of Annual Adventures Gone Awry

    It’s Travel Tuesday and once again I’m reminded of the challenge of living through a global pandemic and a life dismantled by a thousand small cuts. You see, each year with — the exception of last year — we usually go camping with a small group of families.

    Eight adults. The same number of too-rapidly-growing-up kids. Pets. Tents. Campfires. Walks in the woods. Weather. Lakes. Crafts. Bike rides. Outhouses. And whatever new adventure strikes.

    I’m wondering today if this bit of local travel is one more of those cuts.

    This past weekend as the rolling summer booking window started to traverse those optimal summer camping months, The Email made its rounds to the families:

    What’s the plan for 2021? Y’know… with COVID and all that?

    It was a long weekend in late-June and despite the pouring rain upon our arrival, we set up the tents and tried our best to keep our gear dry. We have a lightweight backpacking tent that sleeps three, but a huge truck-camping tent that would make up a hundred and fifty percent of my backpacking carry weight, but lugs out of the truck box easy enough and is rainproof enough to tolerate most of the seasonal weather.

    I had pulled up my photo software and was poking nostalgically through some of my old photos of the last time we went out with that group. Kid cooking marshmallows. A day at the lake-side beach.

    We’re being cautiously optimistic, the first reply came through, but we might cancel at the last minute if things don’t get better.

    Cut?

    We cooked that first night over a hot-spitting fire, fending off the dwindling rain with some steaming cast iron pans. This may have been the exact weekend when some beer-fueled conversations about my collection of pans inspired the registration of a domain name and would a year and a half later kick off a daily blog you may have heard about somewhere.

    I just don’t think that I could keep my distance for an entire weekend while out there with everybody, came a second reply a half hour later. It would be really tough. Thanks for understanding.

    Cut.

    I have any number of summer plans, but one weekend with friends in a remote campsite still seemed like a safe bet.

    Or maybe not.

    Cut.

    Perhaps there will be just the four of us, a fire, a tent, and some lonely cast iron over a gently smouldering fire.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • One Last Trek

    During the summer of 2017 we travelled with friends just across the Alberta-British Columbia border to one of the highest peaks in Canada, Mount Robson and to climb the Berg Lake trail.

    Lucky those friends came along, because they remembered to bring something we forgot: strong tape.

    A pair of nearly-destroyed hiking boots wrapped in blue tape sit in a pile of hiking gear.

    Good boots are one of the most important pieces of hiking equipment you can own if you are a serious backpacker.

    Pictured are not my boots.

    They were the boots that belonged to my wife.

    And up until they crumbled on the trail they were good boots. They were, in fact, fantastic boots… when she bought them as a teenager nearly twenty years before that hike.

    They were even reasonably solid pieces of equipment for the first three days of our adventure, hiking all twenty-some kilometers up the mountain, and then accumulating another twenty or so klicks on the day-hiking trails near the campsite.

    The problem with old equipment though is that every day that you use it, more wear and tear accumulates, more seams are exposed to the elements, more aging glues and stitches weaken, and more chances loom for failure.

    Her boots failed just as we started our downward hike back towards home.

    At the top of the mountain, these boots looked like the good boots they had been for two decades. At the bottom of the mountain I took this photo and then we dropped them in a nearby trash bin.

    Every couple of kilometers we would stop and I would sit at my wife’s feet wrapping them as tightly and securely as I could with a borrowed roll of tape. The glue under between the tread and toe had failed and like an ill-timed puppet show, began flapping open like a mouth at with each and every step.

    The takeaway lesson of these fall-apart boots was not that equipment fails, but rather that you never know when equipment might fail, and being properly prepared means expecting failure and setting yourself up to avoid or mitigate the negative results of that failure…

    …like carrying tape, or not hiking in twenty-year old boots that might fall apart.