Alberta, Alberta...

Isn't that an Eric Clapton song?

It's been a great time exploring a bit more of Alberta Province. 

After Waterton, I did take a quick jog over the border into British Colombia to check out the town of Fernie, which an eavesdropping woman at a yoga studio recommended to me just before I left Denver. It is, as promised, a super-sporty, super-cute, mellow town that was probably worth much more than the half-day I got to spend there. My favorite part was seeing people float down the very cold Elk River on inner tubes on a warm, sunny Friday afternoon. It was bliss just watching them; must've been heaven on the water!

But then back to Alberta, where I loved my visit to Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, a UNESCO World Heritage site where (for no less than 6,000 years) the native people of the Great Plains used incredible skill and cunning to kill potentially hundreds of buffalo at a time by driving them over the lip of a cliff. It was confirmed for me that this is one of the windiest places in Canada--though I actually learned as much by experience early that morning when my tent was nearly blown away with me in it starting at 6 a.m. and continuing until I gave up trying to sleep. But I digress. Even my stingy, museum-wary self loved the visitor's center at this impressive place. And of course the view of the jump itself and the prairie spreading out toward the east was breathtaking. (Or was that the wind, too?)

Then, I was the grateful recipient of some major travel juju when I consulted my ever-growing list of hometowns and e-mail addresses for people I've met while traveling, sent an out-of-the-blue e-mail to M from Calgary (whom I'd met seven years earlier in Zambia), and got back not just a reply but a terrific visit that extended into several days and included much time spent at the Calgary Folk Music Festival listening to so much new (to me) and great music that my head is spinning...

...a local's tour of the city itself (which necessarily includes the oil-funded sports cars that rev their engines at its stoplights by night, and much evidence of the terrible flooding that occurred here earlier in the summer, though somehow it manages to be a totally lovely place regardless)...

...and what was, I think, my first experience of Ukranian food. Borscht, pierogi, cabbage rolls, all right!

I also got to try the oh-so-Canadian delicacy (?) moose sausage, so my time in Calgary has been a serious booster to my cultural education. In some ways it's a very Denver-like city, and so it seems appropriate that the traveling party continues on into the mountains to check out Canada's answer to Vail, which is (I hear; don't Snopes me on this) one of the top tourist destinations in the country. Can you guess? Either way, stay tuned...

Goodbye prairie - here come mountains!

Pretty dramatic, the way the Rockies rise up from the prairie approaching Waterton Lakes National Park in southern Alberta. I guess the same thing happens approaching Denver from the east, but it still startled me after so much flat!

Waterton is contiguous with Glacier National Park in Montana, and though the mountains here don't seem to be as high as the ones on the Montana side (no snowcaps, and not many glaciers at all, despite the slightly higher latitude), it is still a stunningly beautiful area to explore via car and hikes.

I'd been to Glacier NP on the Montana side once before and wanted to focus on the Canada side this time around, but was thrilled to sneak across the border for a few hours when I found out my Denver friend J happened to be there on her own road trip through the northwestern U.S. We had a fantastic dinner in Many Glacier Junction, plus of course conversation about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. She seriously inspired me with her incredible hiking prowess and (as always) hugely happy, adventurous spirit.

I crossed back into Canada feeling totally rejuvenated and drove out to the west side of Waterton for an evening walk, even seeing a black bear in a roadside field on the way back to the town of Waterton Park.

Beautiful, beautiful. Wish you were here.

Saskatchwan

I feel horrible cramming all of Saskatchewan into a single post. But I've been lazy about posting and didn't spend as much time in the province (the best-named of all the Canadian provinces, if you ask me)  as I easily could have. Like Manitobans, the Canadians of Saskatchewan are needlessly self-deprecating. There is enormous beauty here.

Our first night, we camped on one of the gazillions of lakes in the province--this one part of Narrow Hills Provincial Park.

As we made our way to Prince Albert National Park, we unfortunately witnessed the collision of a motorcycle and car (the motorcyclist, though hurt, should eventually be okay), which led to SR dutifully giving a witness statement to an officer at the Waskesiu RCMP branch.

Waskesiu, the summer resort town at the heart of Prince Albert NP, means "Red Deer," and the park delivered, with deer constantly crossing the road in the too-short time we spent there.

Sadly, it was then time to take SR to the airport in Saskatoon (the best-named city in the best-named province) for his return to the life of gainful employment. (Pooh on that, I say!) I stayed a night in Saskatoon with a fantastic CouchSurfing host, R, who showed me around the town that she calls home, including it's free art museum, the beautiful riverfront area, and hip Broadway.

Heading south out of Saskatoon, I stopped at Moose Jaw, which seemed to hold fascination for several of the Canadians I've met along the way--some of them just wondering why I would want to go there (this is for you, M!). I was partly enticed by the mineral hotsprings in town, though I didn't actually end up having time to soak there. Instead, I took a tour of the town's underground tunnels, some of which were a favorite hideout of Al Capone's when he needed to lie low for a bit in a place where the local authorities were as corrupt as he was.

R requested that I be sure to have my picture taken with the big moose stationed at one side of Moose Jaw and put it on the blog--so here you go, R! The guy who took this picture with me was also visiting, in the company of a local woman who told me "Mack the Moose. They put a fence around 'im cause people kept spray painting his privates various colors."

From there, I continued south through increasingly beautiful prairie land to the farm of R's parents, who had been very skeptical of her participation of this CouchSurfing thing but then graciously offered to host me the next night, as their place in the tiny, tiny, tiny hamlet of Glenbain was right in my flight path. R's father B showed me all around their fields of lentils, canola, and wheat, as well as the neighbor's crop of peas, with a gorgeous sunset on one side and moonrise on the other forming the backdrop of our tour.

Before I left, B gifted me a RoughRiders sweatshirt, which he promised will make me lots of friends from Saskatchewan anywhere in the world I might wander.

I left reluctantly, past more fields of lovely lavender flax and so on...

...with a newfound appreciation for grain elevators and their function (now I notice them EVERYWHERE!!!)...

...through the town of Cadillac, where every street is named after a classic car...

...and on down nearly to the U.S. border at Montana, to visit the gorgeous Grasslands National Park. Wow. I just love this landscape and all its subtle colors and beauty. I (thankfully) encountered none of the plethora of rattlesnakes that apparently inhabit the park and (thankfully) encountered sweeping vistas, tipi campgrounds, black-tailed prairie dogs, and sweeping vistas galore. Gorgeous.

Again too soon, I pulled myself away from the prairie and drove through another spectacular sunset...

...to the Cypress Hills area, where I spent my last Saskatchewan night. For now, that is.

Churchill

Since in so many ways Canada is not too dissimilar from America, I was really excited to venture to a more extreme part of the country. SR and I, having reached pretty much the end of the road system when we got to Thompson, Manitoba, then boarded a VIA Rail Canada train bound for the town of Churchill, on the Hudson Bay.

Slowly, the forest gave way to soggy, summer tundra, and the overnight journey deposited us in the place that is most famous for being the "polar bear capitol of the world." The small town's free Eskimo Museum certainly reflects that.

We weren't technically in the Arctic in Churchill, but it sure has that culture.

And plenty of bizarre things to visit that would never be left out there for people to explore and potentially injure themselves on anywhere else. We lucked out and got to stay with a terrific CouchSurfing host, D, who drove us all around the area, to sites such as the wreckage of Miss Piggy, a local plane that was routinely overloaded with cargo until it finally, one day, crashed...

...an old rocket launching building still full of hundreds of thousands of dollars of machinery and weird relics of the days when there was a military base at Churchill...

...the place from which they launch the mammoth "tundra buggies" that take tourists out to Wapusk National Park, primarily in the fall when the polar bears return to the ice forming on Hudson Bay to hunt seals...

...and on a walk out to the wreckage of the Ithaca, which was purposefully grounded by its crew more than 50 years ago when it began to have technical troubles leaving Churchill in a storm. Our host, D, happens to be employed by Parks Canada as a polar bear monitor (he spends all day outside watching any bears in the area to make sure they don't approach tourists to Churchill and Wapusk) and brought his firearm with him whenever we wandered outside of town, just in case. How's that for security?

The tundra scenery on the walk out to the ship, about 12 miles from town, was seriously slowing me down on my walk, as I wanted to photograph everything.

And the shipwreck itself was really impressive. There are no official regulations or protections around it, and we could have climbed up into it as we did Miss Piggy, but it was so sketchy and dilapidated that we weren't even tempted.

One big reason for walking right up to the Ithaca during low tide, though, was that it technically sits in Nunavut waters. So visiting the Ithaca means I've technically been to Nunavut, which was the only Canadian province/territory I'd not had on my summer-in-Canada itinerary due to the exorbitant cost of getting there. This was an essentially free solution that will allow me to say, at the end of the summer that I've been to every province/territory of Canada this year. Just a silly, but fun and satisfying, boast. For now, Nunavut is the 8th province/territory I've hit so far.

D, with his professionally trained eye, spotted a polar bear WAY off in the distance, which even through his binoculars just looked like a big white rock to me. Still, hey, we saw one, even in the off-season! On the opposite end of the size spectrum, nearly as impressive as the enormous shipwreck is the tundra flora, with everything writ in miniature, including this, the smallest willow species in Canada.

Back in town, we spent a good deal of time at Cape Mary, watching dozens of Beluga whales frolic in the Hudson and in the Churchill River estuary. We borrowed D's kayak and paddled out into the estuary but didn't see any whales at that time, and it was too splashy and windy to have risked trying to take a picture anyway. (Look for the white bit just left of center in the picture below--that's not a wave, but a beluga!)

D also showed us maybe the best community garden I've ever seen: the plots are planted in old tires from the tundra buggies!

First Nation culture is also a strong presence this far north, and a beautiful inukshuk (basically a cairn, but constructed in the shape of person and traditionally used to communicate much more than just a hiking route) decorates the town beach here.

After all the polar bear warnings around town...

...and the amount of time we spent at Cape Mary's, where they tend to lurk (and where someone took the time to carve into the rock what they think of the often rainy, windy spot, but must have found a worse one before they got to the final E), we were treated to one final sight...

...of another polar bear. Still very far in the distance, but this time at least recognizable to us as a bear, and I was able to get a picture of it through a pair of binoculars.

And so we left Churchill happy campers, back south on the train to Thompson to retrieve the car and continue west to Canadian province/territory #9: Saskatchewan!