Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Lake O'Hara Zoomwalk, 2011-2013

Over three years, from 2011 to 2013, I eked out some time during our annual visits to Lake O'Hara to accumulate a series of photos that, assembled together, would provide a rapid video-walk, or zoomwalk, around the lake. This blog post publishes the result of that effort.

Given the different days and months in which the constituent photos were taken, this video shows rapid appearance and disappearance of snow, and changes in lighting. It also bobs and weaves with the wriggling trail, but I hope you may nonetheless enjoy it or find it illuminating. I used 1,713 photos to create about three and a half minutes of video.

At 1:12 into the video there appears to be a stutter. It's actually my attempt to highlight a big change between two years; here is a photo from Sept. 15, 2011.
Note the bench hiding behind the short tree at left. Now look at this same scene on July 27, 2012. The bench has been moved in front of a large tree that fell over sometime in the previous ten months.
I interleaved and repeated some of the 2011 and 2012 frames at this spot to give the viewer a chance to compare the two years, but it didn't work as well as I hoped. Forewarned, perhaps you can catch it, starting at 1:12 in the video.



And so after three and a half years this video project is complete. Time to move on!

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

CR2013: Sulphur Mountain, Buffalo Nations Luxton Museum, and Home

Today, September 10th, Joan and I continued to substitute other activities for hiking, to ease the stress on her injured foot. We spent most of the day in Banff, starting with the gondola ride to the top of Sulphur Mountain.

In this photo we're watching gondolas arrive at the top of the mountain, having already gone up ourselves. It's good to arrive at the lower station to buy tickets no later than 10:30, as the tour buses begin to arrive then.
These gondolas hold four adults.
This photo covers the wide view from the gondola complex, starting with the old weather station on the prominence at the extreme left. Far below is the Banff townsite, on both sides of the Bow River, which winds around the prominent Tunnel Mountain. In the distance, at the foot of the far mountains right of center, is Lake Minnewonka.
Zooming in on the center of Banff.
On this side of the Bow sits the famous Fairmont Banff Springs resort.
There is a boardwalk to the old weather observatory, so it's easy to stroll over.
This sign describes how the tough Norman Sanson climbed this mountain for 43 years to collect weather information, starting in 1903. Click to enlarge.
A cosmic ray station was also based here between 1956 and 1978. It's gone now.
Looking back, Joan and I see that the gondola station has a UFO-like appearance. That's understandable, given that it was constructed in 1958-1959. It also underwent renovation in 1997-1998.
A view from the boardwalk down the Sundance Range.
Eventually Joan and I decided it was time to ride back down the mountain.
We then drove to the Buffalo Nations Luxton Museum. This museum is dedicated to the peoples and history of the First Nations tribes of western North America whose lives depended on the buffalo. Photography of the exhibits was not allowed, but I took this picture of the main sign. We enjoyed the museum, but don't need to make a return visit soon.
Afterwards Joan and I had a snack in downtown Banff and then visited the always-fascinating Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies. It's easy to invest an hour or two there. We wrapped up our visit to Banff by checking out the Canada House Gallery, which always has lovely paintings, sculpture, and sometimes fabric work. Handsome stuff. Expensive stuff, deservedly so.

Then we drove back to Kananaskis Country and the Delta Lodge, for our final dinner and evening there. In the morning we finished packing and drove towards Canmore, stopping at the pullover on Highway 40 for O'Shaughnessy Falls. The falls are named after John O'Shaughnessy, who was the chief engineer for the construction of Highway 40, which began in 1973.
The creek begins at a spring high up on the mountain, and this 'forever-flowing' spring was a sacred spring for the Stoney Indians. It was said that neither sickness or disease would afflict those who used its waters.
O'Shaughnessy had the waterfall constructed to control the stream, and then landscaped around the waterfall and built a wishing well. Good work, John! Not every engineer would do that.
We deferred the walk to the top of the waterfall for a later year, and drove on to Canmore. There we visited the historic section of the cemetery. Here are laid to rest many immigrant miners and their families; a study is underway to plan a renovation of this section. We also visited several of the downtown galleries, which is especially fun because they all strive to distinguish themselves from each other. Another downtown stop was our second visit this trip to the CafĂ© Bookstore, which offers wonderful browsing.

The most important part of our visit, however, was to Le Chocolatier. Joan and I have stopped here every year since our discovery of this chocolate-lover's paradise. We bought truffles and bonbons for ourselves and our neighbors, which was a challenge in that Le Chocolatier offers about two dozen flavors to choose from between those categories. We also enjoy some of their specialty items, such as the hedgehogs. For meals on the road or on the trail, however, you can't beat their bars. We gave a boost to Canmore's retail sector here! On our way out of Canmore we stopped at a roadside park and each had a bar for lunch.

Then we ran through the routine of driving to Calgary, filling the rental car with gas, and checking into the Delta hotel at the airport, just next to the rental car return. The rooms are quiet but not huge, the dining room is surprisingly good for an airport hotel, and the airport departure level is just across the drop-off traffic lanes.

After Joan and I returned to Ohio we soon discovered that Joan indeed had a stress fracture in a metatarsal bone, as we suspected. Fun fact: stress fractures typically do not show up in X-ray images until the healing process is well begun, and are diagnosed by symptoms instead. The podiatrist remarked on how slim Joan's metatarsals were -- which is not an advantage! We concluded that the combination of a short training period (after our Arctic cruise), an aggressive hiking schedule, and cross-country rock-hopping was to blame, and we'll take more care in the future.

But, as always, our visit to the Canadian Rockies was a great trip, and we'll be back in the summer of 2014.

Sunday, March 9, 2014

CR2013: Yamnuska Wolfdogs and Highwood Pass Closure

For our first morning of not-hiking Joan and I visited the Yamnuska Wolfdog Sanctuary (YWS), subtitled Alberta Wolfdog Rescue and Adoption. In Canada it is illegal to own or keep a full-blooded wolf, but wolf-dog mixes are allowed under various restrictions and requirements. Sometimes these animals are rescued from the wild (as opposed to being shot), and sometimes they are rescued from unscrupulous breeders or overwhelmed owners.

The domesticated dog (Canis Lupus Familiaris) is a subspecies of the gray wolf (Canis Lupus), so a wolf-dog is considered a mix, not a hybrid. This leads to the terminology "high content,"  meaning an animal exhibiting more wolf traits than dog traits, and "low content." Also, many wolfdogs have parents that are themselves wolfdogs, further muddying their genetic heritage. As you would expect, the more dog heritage the more doggish the behavior, and so also with the wolf heritage. Many breeders claim a much higher percentage of wolf than the animal really has, or specify an absurdly precise percentage. Caveat emptor.

In this photo Georgina De Caigny, one of the founders of the YWS, is bonding with a low wolfdog. An animal that was more wolf than dog would have no part of this.
Georgina gave us some treats to toss to the wolfdogs. The high wolfdogs kept their distance; a few might walk up to a treat if you tossed it near them, but the low wolfdogs would come right up to you and nuzzle your hand if a treat was still there.
The wolfdog in repose on the table in the above photo is a high wolfdog, the alpha female of the pack, and nobody sits on her table except her. The wolf pack rules and hierarchies are always enforced. 
This is the alpha male, Zeus, also a high wolfdog. He would have nothing to do with us, and given that humans have driven the grey wolf to near extinction, that's understandable.
This beautiful wolfdog, called Nova, kept his distance, but was not as standoffish as the alphas. Still, he would not approach us for treats.
Once the novelty of our being inside their enclosure wore off, some of the wolfdogs took a snooze.
When a newly rescued wolfdog is taken by the YWS, it's a delicate time. Anything that is considered a threat to the order of the pack will be attacked, so the newcomer has to make nice, especially to the alphas. A frequent visitor to the pack is, unexpectedly, a Pomeranian named Duckie.
The low wolfdogs love to play with a tennis ball as much as Duckie. The high wolfdogs don't care enough to overcome their skittishness.
Joan and I enjoyed the hour with the wolfdogs, Georgina's stories and the questions and answers. After leaving a donation we then drove down Highway 40, the heart of Kananaskis Country, to the point where the road was still closed because of the June 2013 flooding. This was a kilometer or so beyond Highwood Pass, which had itself been closed when we first arrived in Canada.
The numbers for this storm make it a 500-year event.
Tons of flood material were carried across the highway wherever there was a small stream or gully.
The highway has been cleared by pushing the rubble back against the berm.
This washout comes within inches of undermining the pavement, but for now, it's OK to drive here ... the closure you saw earlier is a hundred yards further on.

We turned around and visited the Kananaskis Lakes on our way back. They had suffered too.
We ate our lunch near the dam separating the upper and lower lakes. It was just a moment's drive to get a view of the upper lake.
From this spot atop the dam I also took a photo looking down to the powerhouse and the lower Kananaskis Lake.
The most dramatic of my photos may be this one, of the "bridge to nowhere" at what used to be the Kananaskis Country Golf Course. The course of the creek has changed, and rubble is everywhere.
Upstream, a large but solitary backhoe was trying to undo Nature's wrath. It's going to take many weeks of work.
That evening Joan and I chose our non-hiking activity for tomorrow: Banff.

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

CR2013: Terrace Trail in Kananaskis

When Joan and I left Kananaskis Village for our hike on the Terrace Trail there were still clouds hanging around the mountains.
At first our route was crisscrossed by other recreational trails, shown at the top of this map, but these dropped away as we headed south.
Sometimes the way was straight and narrow.
Not far from the Village the trail had a short detour around a washout from the floods of June 2013. In this case, a footbridge was AWOL. This photo looks uphill.
And this one downhill.
Perhaps an hour after setting out, we saw the last mists rising up out of the forest. Blue sky forms the backdrop.
The Terrace Trail passes above the Kananaskis Country Golf Course, which as of this writing it still closed from the extensive damage in the June 2013 flooding. Whether it will ever re-open is undecided.
With binoculars, Joan and I could examine each section.
Logs, gravel, debris, newly carved ponds and streams,
almost whatever we could imagine, this course was hit with it.
Soon we saw, in addition to natural calamities, autumnal berries and blooms close up. Here is a rough-fruited fairy bell.
And one of our favorites, which Joan and I have seen all over the Canadian Rockies, the hare bell.
We reached the gully between the two summits of Mount Kidd, a popular stop according to our guidebook, Kananaskis Country Trail Guide Volume 1, by Gillean Daffern. It's scenic and has plenty of sitting opportunities, and we decided to lunch here. This photo looks upstream; notice the small cairn in lower left to guide hikers towards the proper spot on the far side.
Here's the view downstream.
We ate our lunch sitting close to a large cairn, in partial shade. Joan's hand in the foreground provides some scale for the cairn.
This is not a simple rock pile, particularly in the top half, which shows careful rock-balancing. Rock-balancing can be a casual hobby or a strong artistic discipline, and it was fun to see it here. It's catching on.

We were not far from the Galatea Creek trail (see map above), but Joan and I decided it was a good time to turn around. The Galatea Trail was officially closed because of flood damage, and we had to mind Joan's foot. The strong sun continued to boil vapors off the flanks of Mount Kidd.

We encountered many more people on the return leg of this hike than outbound, and we find that's not unusual in Canada. We were the first to the top of Ha Ling, for instance. One couple that caught up to us needed some guidance; they thought they were heading west on the Galatea Creek trail, rather than north on the Terrace Trail! All the flood damage and 'trail closed' signs seemed to have turned them around.

Joan's foot did not like the return trip, especially the second half. Back in our room, we decided that whether it was sprained or perhaps had suffered a stress fracture, the wisest course was to stop hiking for the remainder of the trip.

Thus our first choice for tomorrow became a visit the Yamnuska Wolfdog Sanctuary, outside Canmore. This facility specializes in rescuing canines that are a mix of wolf and dog, and adopting them out to suitable situations, all subject to the Canadian regulations on ownership of animals that are part wolf. There's a phone number for reserving a time for one of the paid tours.

Joan tried to call using her Verizon prepaid phone, which we had determined through the Verizon web site would also work in Canada. That was one of our requirements, and it eliminated most other options, such as Net10 and Consumer Cellular. I have a prepaid T-Mobile phone that works in Canada, but we thought it best to have a different carrier to maximize our chances of getting a signal.

All Joan got was a strange tone similar to a fast busy. She tried more than once. Her phone showed a good signal, the time of day, and her current prepaid balance. But the call wouldn't go through, so it was time to try the T-Mobile phone, which did work. When we returned from Canada Joan called Verizon, and the customer agent said there was a code to enter before leaving the U.S. to authorize roaming in Canada. (T-Mobile requires no such code, it just costs more.) Well, we thought, we could live with that.

A few months later Joan called Verizon again, because their web site doesn't recognize that two $50 refill cards total $100, giving her money only 90 days to live instead of 365. (Stores in our area don't sell $100 cards.) In the past this was easily and cheerfully fixed, but this time the customer agent said that such a thing wasn't allowed, but she would do it "just this once. Don't ask again." Joan also inquired about the Canada roaming code. This person said you have to enter it only once, not before each trip to Canada.

At the end of the call there was the chance to leave customer satisfaction remarks. Joan had a few to make. A Verizon supervisor called her the next day to discuss her feedback. The supervisor said that there was no code, and there was no Verizon prepaid service in Canada, because there weren't any "prepaid towers" there. The concept of a tower being prepaid or not is, of course, ridiculous. The supervisor was astonished that Joan's phone had shown a signal, time, and balance. She insisted that the Verizon web site clearly showed that there was no prepaid roaming in Canada, and walked Joan through the steps to reach the alleged proof. Joan saw nothing of the kind on that web page.

All we can do is enter the magic code that may or may not work before our next trip to Canada. If her phone doesn't work there, Joan will drop Verizon when her minutes expire. But I digress -- we'll start tomorrow with an engaging visit to the Yamnuska Wolfdog Sanctuary.