Snow!

 We've had snow on the ground for a solid week now. Alex's days of riding her bike to school are probably over until May (assuming kids can actually continue in-person education until then). I just read this quotation and had to laugh, as we certainly embrace the snow in this family!

If you choose not to find joy in the snow, you will have less joy in your life 

but still the same amount of snow.

Dinosaur Provincial Park

In every adventure we have had since arriving in Calgary, we've left the city and headed west - to the mountains, towards British Columbia. For the first time ever, we went east. For two and a half hours it was a flat and boring as Kansas (not my observation, but the observation of colleagues from Kansas). But then, as we drove to the park's parking lot, the terrain opened up to a surreal, Martian-like landscape. Hoodoos!

I knew the park was large and that we were allowed to climb the hoodoos, unlike in Drumheller, home of the Royal Tyrrell Museum. Fun fact - so many people don't look at maps before heading out that scores of tourists find themselves at Dinosaur Park, thinking they can just pop down the road to Drumheller and are very sad to learn they are more than 2 hours away from each other, that the Provincial Park home page for Dinosaur has a huge notice explaining this fact. 

As the name of the park suggests, many dinosaur fossils have been found and continue to be found on the grounds. Protocol for finding fossils is to leave them alone and absolutely no removing them from the park. We did not find any. There are two fossil displays: in one, the bones, mud and other artifacts of nature are preserved exactly as the first explorer found the skeleton and the second is a replica of a dig site, with the tools, bones, and detritus of human presence (mostly old water bottles). We climbed and descended, lost a member of the party and found him again, and finished the day with ice cream, about an hour later than we had expected to be at the park.

As we drove in, we grumbled that we would never return. An hour into the day, we resigned ourselves to definitely coming back at least once.

A busy weekend

It turns out to have been a good thing that we had already told the kids we'd head out for our Canmore bike ride later in the morning, as we didn't get to bed until after 1am. We didn't sleep as late as we wanted, but we did sleep as late as our bodies and our little Stomp-a-lots let us.  

We got to Canmore around lunchtime, with the goal to check out one of the restaurants we hadn't yet tried. Our original plan was to take the patio seating, but, well, it was pretty cold. Mountains tend to be colder than prairies.

After our fortification, and a stop at the Canmore Visitors Center for maps, we were on our way! We took a route along the river, and headed toward where there was supposed to be an abandoned mine.  We didn't really find the mine, but did find the abandoned coal car to the side of the bike path. What fall colors exist here (shades of yellow and green) were out in full force. We kept stopping to admire the trees, the deep blue skies, and the river.

Next morning I was up early for a hike with a friend. Terry's Sundays are booked with football and Alex hates hiking so I decided to stop moping and get out there. We headed toward an area where there are three major hiking routes within a couple of kilometers of each other - we heard these particular hikes get very crowded so we wanted choices. 

Why these hikes, you may ask, if they get so crowded? Larches. Before you Google that, a larch is a deciduous tree that changes color and drops its needles. They are comparatively rare, and even around here - a haven for them apparently - there are only specific pockets of space where one can find them on a hiking path.

Anyway, it was a bit of a comedy of errors relating to the overcorwdedness, long line for bathrooms, difficulty finding parking, and then we hadn't communicated well where we'd meet back up so I was by the bathrooms looking for her, while she found where I had parked the car and waited for me there. All this to say, we actually started hiking more than half an hour later than planned. And then we realized the trail we planned to take (Pocaterra Cirque) was (1) like a traffic jam full of humanity and (2) super slippery from all those feet packing down the snow into ice. Yep, Snow/ice all over the trail. On September 27.

After about 10 minutes we turned around and decided we'd hike a different trail. We made a beeline for the least trafficked of the three (Arethusa Cirque). There were a number of fits and starts there too, many photos taken at the earliest stages of the hike and many references to Alltrails because to be honest, the trail was often not obvious. I was so grateful to have downloaded the route in advance!