(Weekly for now) Sunday Update from Vernon

Real Estate:  92 listings and 4 viewings later, we have not yet seen something that grabs us.  We do have 2 viewings tomorrow, but this is turning into a sit-and-wait situation for the time being.  Apparently September is a time for extra activity, so all is not lost yet.

In the meantime, we have not wasted time.  We have joined a gym for a month, starting Aug 1, and have done three hikes in the last week.  (Pictures to follow).

Forest fires:  The number of forest fires have dropped, but we still see haze in the air almost every day, sometimes fairly heavy.  There are warning signs and campfire bans everyone.  Given that there is no rain expected for tomorrow, Vernon will have had no rain in July.  This is a huge contrast to the spring, where they had more meltwater than they had ever seen, flooding, and springs showing up everywhere.  Lake Okanagan water levels have dropped only last week to allow access to beaches again; many docks have been obliterated or damaged.  In the meantime, the temperatures go to the low to mid 30’s in the daytime, but fall to 13 or 14 degrees at night, wonderful for sleeping.  Next week may see us in the high 30’s.

Skiing and Silver Star:  We came to Vernon, knowing that there was a good ski area nearby.  Oddly enough, our apartment is halfway up Silver Star Road to the resort, and it is only 12 minutes to the ski parking lot.

Silver Star is as busy in the summer as the winter because it focuses on mountain-biking (huge) and hiking in the summer.  The ski chairs have been modified to carry up four bikes, followed by their riders on the next chair.

The mountain bikers have three levels of trails, easy, moderate and tough.  We have renamed “tough” to “near death”.  They go over jumps, down big slides, and generally tear around at death-defying speeds. (Old fart language.)  And there are a ton of them.

For those of us who are more sedate, the hiking was fantastic.  We climbed up about 1000 vertical feet, much of which were through conifer forests, but…whenever you got to an open area, the alpine flowers were at their peak.  Lupines, delphiniums, fireweed, hawkweed, daisies, Indian paintbrush—it was amazing.

The views are spectacular, although hazy at times from woodsmoke.

Dirt:  With the dryness, the dust is very, very fine.  It sticks to sunblock, perspiration, and anything that is within 15 feet of its generation.  Showers after the hike seemed to have a lot of dirty rivers, from top down. 

People:  When you meet people on the trail, you talk.  It doesn’t matter where they are from, and this season seems to have a LOT of tourists.  That may be the nature of the summer here regardless.  The long-term “Vernonites” (a proper term according to locals) think the traffic is crazy crazy.  It’s nice to interact with everyone.

I’ll try to update on a weekly basis unless something REALLY exciting happens.  Cheers for now!

Oh, by the way, a couple of inspirational signs (not that we are fixated on this subject):

The New Home--Castle on the Mountain

We arrived in Vernon, BC, late Thursday night after a long day of driving from Edmonton.

Our new castle is a B&B on the road to the Silver Star Ski Resort, and we have lucked in to a tiny apartment that we are renting until the end of August, with a possibility of a longer stay if required.

This is the view we saw from the front door on the first night.

We have a (little!) kitchen, living room, bathroom and bedroom to ourselves and a teeny little patio that we sit on at the end of the day.

The living room window, when not covered with a sun shade, looks out to the same view as from our patio.

Regarding wildfires, there is little or no smoke here in contrast to Edmonton where the haze made the setting sun impressive.

We occasionally get a whiff, and there are temporary signs in Vernon in regard to where evacuees should go, but Alberta showed far more signs of BC wildfires than the interior of BC.

Our transition from Alberta to BC included a highlight where Brian reported to a mandatory watercraft inspection station to ensure his kayak was not carrying any zebra mussels.  Apparently zebra mussels can survive in standing water for up to 30 days.  The inspector assured Brian that his kayak was the cleanest and dryest watercraft she had ever seen.  He was proud of that.

On Friday last week, we met with our real estate agent and the covered 450 km in the car Saturday and Sunday driving to areas that might be of interest.  Aside from getting ourselves oriented, there are chances to see something unusual such as the doe and two fauns we saw in a field.

We will start looking at homes two days from now, and I will update now and then as our search progresses.  In the meantime, we are enjoying sunny dry weather (sorry to those from Ontario) and things are going well.

On to Edmonton

Today was mostly driving, and there is little to share other than this remarkable picture.

If I may explain the significance to you, there are slight hills!  And wild trees!  That is, they are there because they are growing there naturally rather than being planted!!  I can't believe it--we haven't seen anything like this for days.

We are in Edmonton for three days now, and I will post again for a few days.

Medicine Hat to Hanna to Strathmore via Drumheller

Warning:  Potential Boredom--Long Blog

If you follow a map, our route over the last couple of days has been decidedly erratic, which has led to a much greater and better adventure than we ever planned.

We were unable to get accommodation in Drumheller, so ended up finding a room in Hanna, which is about an hour’s drive from Drumheller and only a couple of hour’s drive from Medicine Hat.  Our route was on a quieter road, and we were sailing along when we saw a sign to Dinosaur Park.  Hmm.  I had always known that Drumheller was the “centre of anything regarding dinosaurs” in Alberta, but out of curiosity we decided to take a 40 km side route east.

The terrain has changed from huge fields with grain elevators to huge fields with oil donkeys, above-ground pipe control hardware, and the occasional petroleum storage tank.

It wasn’t until we were within a kilometer of the entrance to Dinosaur Park that we suspected something was different.

There was a viewpoint which looked down into the valley, and wow—what different terrain!

Dinosaur Park is an Alberta Provincial Park.  It features some small trails (we took most of them) and some guided activities, like 1-3 day options for guided prospecting for fossils.  Other than that, much of the park was protected nature reserve.  The prize?  Lots and lots of dinosaur fossils.  Big finds like intact skeletons.  Enough to make this a world heritage site.

I will bore you with a little signage, which explains the uniqueness of this area.

There are three different kinds of rock predominant here—ironstone (hard), loose sandstone (breaks apart easily) and clay/silt.  They come in distinct layers.  This layers were created while the area was a tropical wetland.  Then the glaciers came, then they went, and the meltwater carved out the valleys.  (Simplified non-technical summary….)

Erosion is the name of the game.  The lands here erode at 10 times the rate of the Rockies.  The ironstone, being hardest, resists the most, which is why most of the hoodoos are topped with a red top.

Sandstone is easily carved by water, especially when it carries tumbling rocks.  The clay (formed by volcanic ash) absorbs up to 10 times its volume in water, and is deceptive.  When it dries out, it forms “popcorn rock”.  When it gets rain, it retains the water for a long time, and can be extremely slippery.

We have seen deer tracks in the clay, with 6-8” long skid marks. Even deer have problems here.

Enough geology.  Let me get to the punch line.  Because this was a tropical wetland, it was the home to lots of dinosaurs.  If they died, they were quickly buried by mud and sand, and became well preserved.  There were major finds here in the 1910 to 1917 Dinosaur Rush period.  It became clear over time, that if you waited a year, the erosion might expose more finds.  And so it goes each year. 

A couple of sites in the park have a small building (maybe 20 feet by 15 feet) over an actual fossil find left in situ for people to see.

So I am left with the question—what goes on in Drumheller then?  We find out the next day. 

Drumheller is the home of the Tyrell museum, which is a world-class destination for people from anywhere and everywhere.  We spent half a day there, and saw a wonderful perspective of life through a number of eras, with ample fossils and displays with recreated scenes based on scientific understanding to this date. (Many fossils came from Dinosaur Provincial Park.) Fossils were presented with more lifelike scenes, such as a larger dinosaur being attacked by a swarm of smaller predators.

I suppose that like any other discipline of recreating the past, every day brings more finds that create more theories to test against previous “knowledge”.  Many disciplines are now involved in paleontology.  Geology, botany, zoology, climatology, ecology, anatomy, kinesiology, etc, etc etc.  Each new discovery is just another piece of the puzzle that still needs to be solved.

Drumheller is in a set of badlands, like Dinosaur Park, but I don’t find the hoodoos there as dramatic.

Drumheller hoodoos

Dinosaur Provincial Park Hoodoos

It’s almost like there has been a deliberate move to focus the tourist traffic in Drumheller, which leaves Dinosaur Park in a relatively pristine state and available for more research. One thing we could do outside Drumheller was to walk among the badlands, and illegally pick up fossils.  (No police are allowed to read this.)  Here is a picture of a rock that had all kinds of worm tubes and other artifacts.  Unfortunately, it was too big for me to take away.

We were lucky by learning what we did in Dinosaur Park, and then have it reinforced in the Tyrell Museum with so much educational material. 

As we were leaving Drumheller, a big storm system blew in, with winds that turned the badlands into a sand blasting machine.  Rain followed for a brief period, but mostly seemed to evaporate before hitting the ground.  Nonetheless, the temperature dropped from 22C to 7C in merely minutes.  The whole sky looked hazy , but that turned out to be wood-smoke from the BC fires in the Kootenay Region. The smell of smoke is strong.

(PS  The reason for the difficulty in finding accommodation was that this weekend was the last weekend of the Calgary Stampede.  That also explains the hordes of people in the Tyrell…whew!)

One small highlight of the Tyrell Museum was the outdoor dining area—rife with gophers.  These guys had the temperament and activity level of the chipmunk (high energy, constant fighting and squealing and other attractive moments).  Despite the “Do not feed” signs, another group threw lettuce to the beasts.

We will be in Edmonton tomorrow to see family and friends.

Hanging Around the Cypress Hills

We made an effort to see the best parts of Cypress Hills (now an inter-provincial park) by visiting Fort Walsh in the morning, and doing some walking in the Cypress Hills in the afternoon.

To get to Fort Walsh, we had to return through Maple Creek, which had some interesting road signs as well as a farmer's market in process.

Eastern Canada, especially in Ontario, is focused on the history of the War of 1812.  That is totally irrelevant to what was happening in the south of Saskatchewan and Alberta.

Fort Walsh was established as a NWMP outpost to establish law and order in the aftermath of a war between the US and Lakota Indians.  The Indians, headed by Chief Sitting Bull, moved as refuges to Canada to escape retaliation.  The commander of the unit, William Walsh, established a well-respected outpost, first with 30 constables, then growing to 300 constables, for a brief period in the late 1800’s.

It was not an easy life for the first arrivals.

(This was the site of the first breeding and training for the black mounts of the RCMP Musical Ride, until budget cuts finally moved the section to Ottawa.)

I didn’t take many pictures, for much of the site was reconstructed, but the prison accoutrements were impressive. (Ball and chain, locked handcuffs, etc)

Some ball and chain--it was really heavy!  The rules for prisoners were extremely strict as well, and minor sentences were a mere 2 years less a day of hard labour.

Apparently, Fort Walsh had a magnificent deterrence value from holding two 9-lb cannons. 

Their riflery was legend, so it didn't require use of the cannons, but they did have a big ace card to play.

The terrain of Cypress Hills is fascinating, for it was the only part of Canada that wasn’t glaciated due to its height.  There are deep valleys with trees, surrounded by prairie grasslands for miles.

In the afternoon, we went walking on a trail.  This was the first warning sign we encountered.

We did not meet cougar, but we did see white-tailed deer, a red squirrel, and finally a grouse.  We stopped and made (what we hoped were) grouse sounds, and it appeared to work, because we had a good back-and-forth conversation consisting of a number of clucks and chirrs for several minutes.  The bird was literally about 5 feet away from us.

Driving back to Medicine Hat, Brian saw a scene he couldn’t resist—another example of farm yard art.

Albertans are apparently quite careful of their privacy.  This was the sign near the farm yard art.

What can I say?!