Essentially the Only One

To someone used to living in the lowlands of the Midwest, it's hard to underestimate the impact of the sight of the Rockies rising out of the high plain here in Alberta. From a distance they look like a wall, sheer and uninviting. I can only imagine the effect this view had on the earliest pioneers - certainly it made feel as if there was a great big 'STOP' sign planted firmly in the landscape. An amazing sight.

One of the more striking aspects of the land surrounding Pincher Creek, Alberta, was the proliferation of wind turbines.

This ridge just off the road leading into Crowsnest Pass caught my eye due to the unusual turbine supports. More like conventional power pylons than the smooth white stalks you see elsewhere (including elsewhere in this particular region).

We've stayed in Pincher Creek for a couple of days. We like this town and we like our motel, The Blue Mountain Motel. Very accommodating and friendly.

This gives us the chance to look around locally in a bit more depth, and today we went again to Waterton Lakes National Park.

A drive through the park took us to Red Rock Canyon, where we found this happy scene of people playing and bathing in the bright red rock creek, as this fisheye shot shows. It reminded me of Missouri's Johnson's Shut-Ins before that particular park was hit by a dam failure.

We decided to skip the creek, and walk down a trail that led deep into the valley. I recalled the trails we had taken in the Scottish Highlands last year, except we, on the trail path, were already at 1500 meters and the highest Scottish mountain, Ben Nevis, is only 1344 meters high!

Each I found myself lulled into a Highland mood, I would look up and see some vast rocky crag rising to the sky that was most un-Highlandish.

The air is wonderful here. Clear, light, and rich with the scent of pine trees.

The trail was easy, but we stopped frequently just to look at the view.It's not easy to do justice to the scale of these huge mountains, but this shot of my wife disappearing down the trail ahead of me perhaps gives some idea.

After a while, I began to get a feel for this landscape, cooler, drier and more remote than the Highlands. Less forgiving and friendly perhaps, largely because, unlike many of the Scottish hills, it rises out of a high plain and not the sea.




Beautiful and impressive, nonetheless.

A drive this afternoon into Crowsnest Pass that links Alberta to British Columbia.

I didn't get very far. The first thing that caught my attention was this extraordinary dead tree, the Burris Tree, that marked the eastern end of the pass. This tree, that had stood alive for seven centuries, died in the 1970s. Such was its historical and geographical significance that the dead wood was preserved and ressurected as you see here.

A couple more bends in the road and I found myself in the midst of this extraordinary rock field. I pulled into a lay-by and read the historical marker. This was the Frank Slide, a massive and catastophic landslide that fell in 1903 onto the mining town of Frank. Where did it come from?

From here - Turtle Mountain.30 million cubic metres (82 million tonnes) of limestone fell away at 4:10 am on April 29, 1903, destroying a good part of the town, killing 70 people and burying a group of miners underground. Only by tunneling through a seam of coal were the miners able to dig themselves out, one to discover that his family had been crushed to death by the landslide.

Ironically, Turtle Mountain was called the Mountain That Moves by the local native Americans who would never camp near its base. As is often the case, such knowledge was dismissed by the European settlers, much to their cost.

I was planning to go further into Crowsnest Pass but somehow this mountain and those massive strewn rocks with those poor mining families still buried beneath them held me. As good a reminder as any of the impartial, monstrous, power of nature.