Roadtrip Day 5 Medicine Hat, AB to Regina, SK

Once again, we head out at the crack of 11am on our quest for good coffee. The GPS leads us to the Madhatter Coffee Roasting Company, cute and a good cup of coffee to get us back on the road again.

Back on the Trans Canada Highway 1 heading east to Regina we took a sideroad, Highway 41 to Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park, which is park managed by both Alberta and Sakatchewan. Here we saw a small wheat colored fox just of the highway, sorry no picture he was gone by the time we turned around. We took a drive through the park and headed to Horseshoe Canyon and a view of the plains beneath us. The Cypress Hills are on of the few places in Western Canada that escaped glaciation. As the glaciers melted, water carved steep sided valleys into the slopes. Horseshoe Canyon was created by a landslide that slid down into the valley.


View from Horseshoe Canyon.

The landscape here is very different that the plains. Here we came across pine covered hillsides and a couple of very nice campgrounds that to our surprise were completely empty except for some wild turkeys.



Descending to the town of Elkwater we came upon The Elkwater Lake Lodge and Resort, we will be checking this out on the way back we think. As we drive out of the park along the rolling hills we saw one elk grazing in what Ro called "Teletubbie Land".

As we left Alberta and pushed on into Saskatchewan we passed lakes and what appeared to be marshlands with an abundance of duck and hawks. About 85 km from Moose Jaw, SK we come across large, white salt deposits. We are in the Chaplin Lake area which is noted from the Western Hemispheric Shorebird Reserve Network for its Shorebirds. Chaplin Lake was designated a Western Hemispheric Shorebird Reserve Network site in May 1997. This is the highest designation that a reserve can receive and there are only 35 sites recognized in the Western Hemisphere (only 5 of them being in Canada). Chaplin Lake is the second largest saline water body in Canada.  Sorry no pics. :-(

Onward to Regina for the night....

P.S.  Don't believe everyone when they tell you the plains are flat, we saw this sign as we were driving out of the Cypress Hills.

Roadtrip Day 4 Waterton NP, AB to Medicine Hat, AB

In the morning we went for breakfast and coffee at the Waterton Bagel & Coffee Co., where we spoke with Tom the proprietor's son whose family also owns the small movie theater in Waterton and Pincher Creek. We had a long pleasant conversation about the park, movies and people he has met working the summers in Waterton.

Tom

After breakfast while packing the car, a reporter from Global TV in Lethbridge approached us and asked if she could ask some questions about the Government's freezing park fees in an effort to encourage visitation. View Rhett on TV here. Select the May 25 video, Rhett is at 7:37

It was time to get out and explore the park a little before moving on. First we took a short drive to Cameron Falls, then we took a drive to Cameron Lake, frozen and rimmed with snow covered mountains. That's Montana on the other side! We had the place to ourselves not one other car in the parking lot. The interpretive sign warns of grizzlies. We enjoyed the serenity of a place that is usually jammed with visitors at the peak of the season. On the way down we stopped at a look out and caught a glimpse of Cameron Creek 1000 feet or 300 meters below us leading down to Upper Waterton Lake. A lazy Bighorn sheep lay at the side of the road barely giving us a glance as we passed by on the way down. We then took the drive to Red Rock Canyon where we took a short walk along the canyon itself, the bedrock is strikingly red. We then took a short hike to Blakiston Falls, a thundering cascade and once again few if any people. Leaving the park, we watch the mountains shrink in our rearview mirror again, this time for good. :-( Soon the memory of the mountains will be overtaken by views of grassland horizons. We head east towards Medicine Hat.

Cameron Falls

Cameron Lake

Blakiston Falls


Red Rock Canyon

Cameron Creek

Roadtrip day 3 Fernie, BC to Waterton NP, AB

Fernie is a destination not to be missed by travelers. This is a town with history that is obvious by the architecture.

There is a fresh influence in Fernie due to the high number of residents under the age of 30. Outdoor enthusiasts abound in this town. There are no shortage of trails for biking and walking or Frisbee golf!
Another perfect day in temperature. We had breakfast at the Blue Toque in the the old railway station. It was organic home grown food and coffee. We sat at a table on what would have been the old passenger platform with a view of the mountain and the railroad track less than 50 feet away. A train even came by loaded with coal.

We took a walk along a section of old track, took a lot of pictures and we didn't seem to want to leave.

Back on Highway 3 we head towards the Crowsnest Pass on our way to Waterton National Park. In Sparwood, BC we say the world's largest truck. Remember those tires from day one? They might not have been big enough. Sparwood is also still a large coal mining town, you can see the stripped hills from both mining and logging operations. Note Roanna by the front wheel.

A little further up the road we entered Alberta, we began our climb over Crowsnest Pass from an open valley in a bowl. We stopped at the Crowsnest Travel Alberta Information Centre where we got a wealth of information about southern Alberta from an extremely helpful employee. Armed with a bag of booklets and catalogs we moved on and made our way down from the pass area to Pincher Creek. Along the way we passed the site of the Frank Slide where on April 29, 1903, at 4:10 a.m., 74 million tonnes (30 million cubic metres) of limestone crashed from the east face of Turtle Mountain and covered approximately three square kilometres of the valley floor and is the greatest landslide in North American history.

As we enter Pincher Creek after winding down from the pass, the mountains where only an image in the rearview mirror. We were now on the edge of the plains. We headed south towards Waterton with the Rocky Mountains paralleling our travel. Ahead of us snowy peaks and 600 million year old rocks. Heading into Waterton, the park was eerily empty of visitors except for mountain goat and bighorn sheep that linger about the town like lawn ornaments. They are very accustomed to park visitors thus allowing for some very intimate photographs. While taking pictures of these majestic animals we stuck up a conversation with a woman who happened to work for Travel Alberta who was full of information and enthusiastic to share it with us. We shopped around for a room with a view and chose one with a view of Lower Waterton Lake.

The welcoming committee.

This town is the most scenic place we have been to on the trip thus far. With the town in the foreground, lake behind and mountains framing the view.

Roadtrip Day 2 Castlegar, BC - Fernie, BC

Leaving Castlegar this morning was like one of those long goodbyes, climbing the mountain and looking back, she is such a pretty sight. The viewpoints kept begging for pictures and the weather was so perfect.

Continuing on Highway 3, the Crowsnest Highway, this two lane road leads you through pine forests with snow covered mountain peaks as your backdrop. You wind your way through a canyon following the Salmo river just past Highway 6 which leads south to the US border, catching glimpses of the rushing spring run-off through the trees at every bend. The highway begins it ascent up to Kootenay Pass at 5,800 feet/1774 metres you again get a sense of the pressure changing as you climb in elevation. The beauty of this area cannot be described well enough, it leaves you speechless in your descriptions. It is like passing through an evergreen womb, you are delivered in a way by the beauty. This could be as close as you can get to driving in wilderness, nothing but tree covered mountain and a rushing river to follow.

The drive up to Kootenay

The Pass

It all opens up into the Creston Valley, a huge diverse landscape of marshland and farmland in the framework of the mountains. In Creston we found the Buffalo Trails cafe where we had homegrown buffalo chilli and good coffee from "Dooey, Roast'em and Howe" :-) Leaving Creston in yet another ascent towards a wall of treed mountain we came across a lone cyclist in search of farm labour work but unsure of what direction to go. After some map searching we realized he was headed the right way so we all continued respective quests.

Creston Valley

Lone cyclist

We continued onward towards and through Cranbrook, an urban sprawl in its early stages. From here we had to head south to go east. This is why.

Near Elko we saw our first mountain goat. Both mountain goat and bighorn sheep share the same terrain here. We arrived in Fernie a sophisticated ski town with three different mountain views to choose from, snowy range, rocky crag or evergreen. The Best Western Fernie Mountain Lodge offers rooms with views of all that. And so this is where we decided to spend the rest of the afternoon and evening.

Roadtrip Day 1 Vancouver-Castlegar

The departure for our month long adventure across Canada and back resembled a geriatric Olympic event. As we shuffled up and down the stairs with all of our bags in slow motion, pensive and organized, Rhett packed the car. We finally got "out there" at the cuckoo clock crack of noon. (Oh well)

Traffic was light as we passed the satellite cities; Burnaby, Surrey, Langley, Abbostsford, Chilliwack and onto Hope. We drove through the forested Manning Park where we saw not one but TWO black bears at the side of the road. It was very exciting! We saw countless deer grazing as well. We stopped in Princeton at Cowboy Coffee where you can get a decent cup. We had been there before on our last trip out to Oliver. We drove through a town called Hedley, a historic gold mining town full of great attractions, like a mine tour, a western style downtown and B&Bs. We made a note to come back here sometime, as a destination. Outside Hedley, the terrain becomes more desert-like with sagebrush and rolling hills. We passed Osoyoos and climbed over Anarchist Mountain and through Grand Forks, a big ole town with nice architecture. Passed ranches and organic farms and orchards and over Bonanza pass, 1500 metres/5000 feet. Both our ears plugged up until our eyes nearly popped out of our eye sockets. Ok, not really but our ears are still buzzing as if we just got out of a loud concert. We landed in Castlegar just as daylight fell, where we are spending our first overnight.

Some big ass tires!

The Cowboy Coffee shop in Princeton

Hillside outside of Keremeos

Two views of the Similkameen Valley

Holy Smoke, Batman

Well, after living in our neighborhood for all these months and hearing the sirens and in some cases the smoke of the occasional fires, we finally had some excitement of our own today.

At around 1pm this afternoon we were gettings things in order for our road trip when the building fire alarm went off. Our first thought was that some joker had pulled the fire alarm, but I went out to investigate anyway. Saw one person in the hall who also wasn't sure what was going on so I went down the the stairs and upon entering the stairwell I could smell smoke, it got stronger when I entered the lower floor, so I went back upstairs to tell Roanna and ran into someone banging on all the doors yelling that there was a fire. After a few frantic minutes of gathering up passports and other important papers and items, we got out of the building. Once outside there was a small gathering of people and we could hear the fire department on their way. All turned out well, as it was just a minor fire in one of the corner apartments. Don't have all the details, but it seems that an elderly man forgot about some food his wife left for him on the stove, not the first time either apparently.

Kudos to the Vancouver FD by the way, they got here in less than ten minutes, maybe as little as five.

Below are some pics, nothing very exciting. Sorry. Ro insisted on the photos of the "cute" firefighters.

US Election 2008

Ok, so it is a little late to be writing about the US elections, but we didn't have the blog then and it was actually quite interesting being here watching from the outside.

So, one would think that since we are in Canada there would be some interest in the US election but what we experienced here was something akin to a religious revival. We certainly knew that there was interest in American politics here, but we did not expect the level of interest that we experienced. Obamamania was just as rampant north of the border as it was to the south. There were Obama bobbleheads, t-shirts and other paraphernalia in many of the stores. After having to bear the eight dreadful years of the Bush presidency, Canadians and the rest of the world were eagerly awaiting a change. It was amazing to walk around and hear all the excited conversation about a foreign election. There were actual election parties the night of the election! (see the picture below) The buildup to the election was on all the Canadian news channels, so much so, that it threatened to drown out their own general election that was held on October 14. (They did manage, however to get Harper, Bush's "mini-me", re-elected but that is another story) After the election one could almost here the collective sigh of relief as it became apparent that "change" was on its way to Washington.