what a picture is worth

I take lots of pictures. Some of those photos are worth recalling, writing and sharing a few words about… maybe not a thousand words, but definitely a few words.

Posted on episode 310

Hiking: Mountain Bunkers

Back in March of this year, 2022, we made yet another long weekend into a family adventure getaway to the mountains. With few plans besides a booked hotel suite and our hiking gear, we landed in the town of Canmore after a four hour spring drive.

A year earlier we had zipped off to the same general area (but a different side of the mountain and a different set of plans) and had done some fun, easy hikes but then had a crazy winter drive back home at the end of it all.

While the forecast turned out to be more cooperative this trip, we were a lot less prepared for what to do with our relatively pleasant weather. So when I suggested a short hike to try and find the mysterious nuclear fallout bunker on the side of a nearby mountain, there were few objections.

for whatever one photo is worth:

If you stand at the mouth of the Heart Creek Bunker and look North (and down) you can easily see the Trans-Canada Highway snaking by in the valley below, rounding the corner of Lac des Arcs and disappearing around the far end of the same mountain upon which you are standing.

The bunker is not difficult to find, though the route is not clearly marked as to what you will see when you embark on the short two kilometer trail part way up the side of a cliff face.

In fact, if it wasn’t for various social media and independent hiking guide sites I doubt many people beside the locals who live in nearby Canmore would know about this odd little gem.

As the story goes, the bunker was started (but never finished) in the late 1960s as “part of a Cold War-era plan to keep important government records safe in the event of a disaster, up to and including a nuclear bomb.”

But it leaked, water dripping through the porous rock, and then too political tides changed and I’m sure the whole endeavor became financially unfeasible so… now there is a cave dug out a couple hundred meters into the side of a mountain, and a narrow, unmarked trail through the forest leading to its entrance.

There were three other hiking parties there when we arrived in the mid-morning, and also about a half dozen other dogs. We chatted and let the dogs play and took each other’s photos at the mouth of the cave.

Then we went in.

It was pitch black inside save for the lights we carried with us.

I took as many pictures as I could in the dim light and recorded some video:

The walls were marked with graffiti and messages from past visitors as the site is apparently popular with locals for parties and late night fun and light painting and boondocking.

The dog was spooked by the whole experience and she needed to be carried out after less than ten minutes in the pitch black and eerily quiet cave.

And then … we turned our back and returned down the mountain path to our car. On the ride home, spotty mountain internet service stretched to the limit, my wife who is usually a planning and research guru for our travels took the chance to finally look up the weird history of the strange mountain bunker we’d just visited. Even our server at dinner later that evening perked his ears and seemed curious that a trio of tourists had made their way up to the secret Canmore bunker.

Off-the-beaten path sights are not necessarily rare, but they are always weird and magical and mysterious when you find them… especially if you didn’t even plan on looking in the first place.

Posted on episode 276

Adventure Runs Season Two

I may have written earlier this year about how I’ve spent each of the last two summers devising a weekly run outing for my running crew.

Each week over about fourteen weeks of summer we would meet at a location I’d disclosed earlier in the day for a six to eight klick run.

It could be through a neighbourhood. It could start in a bedroom community outside the city. It might wind through the river valley in an interesting place. It just had to be somewhere interesting, new or both.

What adventure from 2021 will be forever etched upon your memory.

for whatever one photo is worth:

In mid-June I summoned the runners to a location on the far east side of the city in a small park area adjacent to a billionaires row of oil refineries.

From here the mighty North Saskatchewan river wends past the last few suburbs of Edmonton and out into the vast prairies, Atlantic-bound (or at least towards the Atlantic via the Hudson’s Bay).

We parked, lathered up in bug spray and trotted off into the valley at a casual running pace.

Along the way we encountered treacherous cliffs, uncertain detours, instagrammable locations to pose with rusted out vehicles, paths lock to construction, bushwacking through low tree branches, a small but wet water crossing, a climb up a grassy summer ski hill, and a slog through an ill-marked trail …or three.

It was a kooky but amazing little evening adventure.

And it was topped off by the fact that as we all went to drive away home from the single exit to the park, there stopped a freight train blocking our path of escape for nearly an hour. We all wandered around outside of our queued up vehicles and lamented the real meaning of an urban evening adventure that ended with a prairie blockade.

Local adventure is what you make of it. It’s finding something new, even if new is just a few minutes drive from where you live, work, or usually play.

I think back on that evening in mid-June and how it defined what could go sideways on a quirky, loosely-planned run, but it also highlighted exactly why we crave such things at all. It is now, even almost six months to the day later, stuck in my brain as one of the weirdest evenings of the summer… in a good way.

Thirty one topics. Thirty one posts. Not exactly a list… but close. In December I like to look back on the year that was. My daily posts in December-ish are themed-ish and may contain spoilers set against the backdrop of some year-end-ish personal exposition.

Posted on episode 273

Glacial Stares

Sometimes things just click.

Sometimes you need to do a hike up the side of a mountain to an interesting place, lay on the bare ground and get the moment just right for things to work out how you want.

Describe the best picture
you took in 2021.

for whatever one photo is worth:

We had booked a week in the mountains during the lull in the pandemic, checking into a hotel we wouldn’t have sprung for if the borders had been wider open and tourists were filling them for higher prices than we were paying.

We spent our days exploring, day trips mostly, driving from short hike trailhead to short hike trailhead, snacking in the car on the way between and keeping the dog calm on one of her first (of many) family adventures.

Mount Edith Cavell is a short drive from Jasper, Alberta, and for the price of forty five minutes of hiking up a steep-ish but well-worn stoney trail one can sit beside a glacial lake in August and overlook the remains of the Angel Glacier and her various small bergs afloat in the freezing cold water.

We did just that.

And among the small crowds of other tourists we found a quiet spot to sit and look out at the view and admire the natural beauty of this place, pausing for a moment in the (then) nearly year-and-a-half long frustration epic that had been lockdown.

I did what every good father and camera guy should do. I laid down on the rocky beach and tried to get at least one epic photo of my family.

A photo from this short series, one where my daughter’s face is far more identifiable in the shot that would be suitable for a public blog, is the picture we sent out on the front of our Christmas card this year. It seemed appropriate and poignant and pretty much summed up the mood of our year.

Thirty one topics. Thirty one posts. Not exactly a list… but close. In December I like to look back on the year that was. My daily posts in December-ish are themed-ish and may contain spoilers set against the backdrop of some year-end-ish personal exposition.

Posted on episode 233

Travel: Fruits, Wines, and a Weekend Half

Two years ago this past weekend the world was a very different place.

The world was different enough that we had no issues hopping into the car, driving for nearly ten hours straight, and wending our way across the prairies, over the rocky mountain passes, and into the verdant Okanagan Valley in nearby British Columbia.

for whatever one photo is worth:

The official travel excuse was that I had signed up for an October half marathon in Kelowna. Yet my wife has a healthy collection of extended family who have located to the micro-climate over the past ten years and we were due for a visit.

As much as Canada sometimes deserves its reputation as a vast semi-arctic wasteland, even the locale in a radius hundreds of kilometers from where I sit writing this (which is frozen and snow-covered for half the year), there are places in this vast and diverse country which are fertile and lush.

One of those less-often-frozen zones is the Okanagan Valley, a longitudinally positioned string of deep lakes tucked between the high peaks of the continental divide rocky mountains to the east and the lusher coastal mountains nearer to Vancouver to the west.

The weather-stabilizing effects of this location and the nearby water features means that a climate zone amenable to ample fruit tree orchards and sprawling vineyards exists and makes the region both desirable as a home for hundreds of thousands and a tourist destination for multiples more.

I would move there in a heartbeat given the right opportunity, but two years ago we merely wedged ourselves into the tourist category.

Two days in the area was barely enough to get a taste of everything, though.

On Saturday we visited the local famer’s market in the morning, ate lunch on the pier, collected my race package in the park, wandered through a corn maze on a hobby farm, and visited a wine tasting at a vineyard (pictured) along the road to the house where we had set up camp.

On Sunday I toured a twenty-one point one kilometer stretch of waterfront and urban streetways on foot and recorded one of my better half marathon times in the perfect autumn weather, before slipping back to shower, change and pack the car for the push back across the mountains and home.

Our intention was to make it an annual trip.

A run.

A visit.

Good food.

Fresh fruit and great wine.

Somehow though, the last two years has made the world a very different place and, like so many others around that world, even nearby adventures have fallen to the bottom of our possibilities list.