Lake O'Hara Larches

This past weekend we went to Lake O'Hara, and area just on the BC side of the continental divide with our friends Brian and Christian. This is a restricted-access area that you have to book 3 months in advance, and ride a yellow school bus in along a very bumpy road to get into. Great for overseas vacationers, but a little more difficult to get into for us locals. Mat had the foresite to book it in June. We we went in for 3 days and did a little hiking, a little climbing, and enjoyed some fabulous wealther and golden trees! By the way, yes, that is Mat swimming in the icy waters!

My Mom's Amazing Garden

Just to share some pictures with you all of my mom's garden in Saskatoon. I hope some day that I inherit a bit of her green thumb!

Mat and Stacey's BC Trip Aug 2007

2 glorious weeks off! First we headed to Rogers Pass area in BC, and did some hiking in windy wet weather. This area is famous for glaciers, high snowfall, and giant cedars. THe reason behind the glaciers, high snowfall and giant cedars is apparent in this photo, it rains a LOT!


Squirrels hard at work preparing for winter at Rogers Pass.


Mat and I enjoying another 'one-pot' supper at a cooking shelter on top of Mt Revelstoke in Revelstoke National Park (we got to drive up to this one). Mat was very proud of his new and very expensive dromedary bag!


Finally some warm sun and swimming in Vernon. Stopped at Ellison Park for a bit of climbing and lots of swimming. We spent a good hour lounging on the blue inner tube that you see in the middle of the picture, the owners where gone for a ride so we decided to take over the ship.


After our stop in the Okanagan we make it to Powell River where Ray takes us on a triatlon of sorts, swimming, sailing, and outrigger canoeing, all in one fantastic day. In this picture, Ray is steering (seat 6), I'm on seat four and Stacey is in seat three.


After Powell River we press on to Zeballos where we start our 6 day sea kayak trip. This sea star bed was where we started our journey.


On the second day, we had some rain and we went for a paddle in the Nuchatlitz reef where we spotted a raft of sea otters. Sea otters are the curious little dogs of the ocean. Apparently they can spend their whole lives in the ocean. Another interesting fact is that the Vancouver Island population was at one time wiped out and these little fellas here are transplants from Alaska.


Our kayak trip was organized thru the U of C and we had a group of 12 people including 2 guides, Chad and Jenn. This is our camp 1 beach, at Rosa Point.


Eventually we moved camp to Benson Point on Nootka Island. We spent 2 nights there and the second day we went for a day paddle to explore some river outlets. We took turns riding the waterfall current.


Ladies and Gentlemen, let me introduce you to the Lime-o-nator or as we called it the Sub-Lime. Packing and moving camp was Matt's organizational nightmare come true.


Dawn enjoying our third and last camp was on Garden Point.


Enjoying stories with Bob and a nice fire on our last night.

This is our kayaking group with our guides Jen and Chad


After getting off the water, we started back towards Calgary. Melanie and Rick kindly shared their cottage on Okanagan Lake, Ellison park is actually straight across the lake. Full circle i tell you.


The obligatory parting shot. This sunset was from Benson Point on Day 4 of our Kayak trip.

Labour Day Weekend Backpacking trip - Birdwood Traverse K-country.

A late start on Sunday morning and we started our trip. First stop was Burstall Pass but Stacey spotted a nice grassy slope that would provide us with a 2km shortcut. Up we go and finally we found ourselves on Birdwood pass. Once at the pass it got a bit chilly so Stacey decided to get some warmer clothes on and I took the opportunity to look at the map and figure out where to go. At that moment I happen to glance up I see this large grizzly bear walking directly towards us. OH S*&T!!!! We start yelling and the bear is not changing direction, Stacey frantically tries to ties her boots and I get the bear spray out and start assembling the bear flare. All this takes about 20seconds but it feels like minutes. Finally the bear hears us (he was upwind) and we start moving right and he starts going to our left. We finally breathe a sight of relief realizing that he was letting us by and he didn't want anything to do with us.



Bear going on his merry way.


Caterpillar on the scree slopes. Apparently the small things in life amazed us for the next 30 minutes after our encounter.


Going up to the high col.


Looking back down towards Birdwood Pass.

At the end of day 1, we reached a high col and got a sight of Mt. Smuts.

From the Col we also got a nice view of the Birdwood lakes. We set our camp next to the upper lake (to the left, just off the picture). And of course we had a permit. Not a bad site, considering that our closest neighbour was on the lower lake and it was the long weekend.

Stacey lost a clog in the fight against the brush.

This shot was taken at sunrise. After meeting a grizzly bear, you can't expect to get much sleep that night.

On our way back down, between Mt Smuts and Mt BIrdwood. Once we got on the road we hitch hiked the remaining 5 km to our car, luckly Stacey is also a car magnet and we got a ride from the first car that passed.

What we've been up to in July!

Well, July saw some fabulous weather here in Calgary, in the 30's for nearly 2 weeks straight sending us cold-blooded mammals into heat shock! We did manage to get out climbing, hiking, and biking a few times, saw some amazing wildflowers, visited Stacey's family at the cabin in Saskatchewan (where Mat tried wakeboarding for the first time and even caught a fish!). Mat turnd the big 3-0 with a nice visit from his parents at the same time. Here's some of our latest pics. Check back nearer Sept for an update on our summer holiday kayaking in BC!

King Creek Ridge

Last weekend, my friend Andrea ("Smithy" to a few select individual) came visit on her way thru Calgary. We all went out to enjoy some mountain scenery at King Creek Ridge which is just up the road from Kananaskis Lakes (See Canada Weekend Post). An hour or so uphill leads to a nice ridge walk from which we could see some Bighorn sheep. To make things interesting we decided to go back using a different descent. This lead to 2 hours of yelling to scare off bears and some tricky water crossing on slippery logs. A few had wet feet by the time we got to the car. At least no bears where seen or heard. Stacey took some nice flower pictures on the ridge.