Day 354: Vancouver In The Rain

I think I saw this rock on my very first visit to Vancouver, before we'd experienced the shades of grey that rainy days bring. My boss even warned me how grey and rainy the winters are here. Maybe it's because I grew up in Britain, but for the most part the rain has never bothered me. Like the author of the text on the rock, sometimes it does get to you but then, yes, you stumble across something that thrives on our liquid sunshine, and suddenly it's not so bad. Like yesterday in Stanley Park. I think that the rain in May and June is more annoying, as by then, after enduring a grey winter, you feel you've earned a bit of warm sunshine.

Vancouver In The Rain

Day 186: Of goats and crowns

Today we went up to Goat Mountain, probably our favourite North Shore hike. We haven't been up there for three years so we felt we were long overdue a return visit. Plus we have our annual pass for Grouse Mountain which allows us to use the gondola for "free", so saving our sanity from the tedium that is the Grouse Grind. The views from the summit of Goat are superb and to my mind represent the best return for the least investment. Crown Mountain dominates the view immediately to the north and I took a couple of photos of the sheer rock faces. In one of them I noticed a group of five hikers perched on the summit of Crown, enjoying the view and the fine early autumn weather. We're thinking of putting Crown on our list for October, if the weather holds, since we haven't done that one yet.

Crowning achievement

Day 161: The Burgess Shale

Yes, the famous Burgess Shale! After reading Stephen Jay Gould's book Wonderful Life in the mid-1990s, I was hooked on all things related to these fossils. Our original plans for this trip to the Rockies were to spend a few days in the Lake O'Hara area, but when we couldn't book that we thought we'd just idle away our time in other parts of Yoho National Park. We remembered seeing the Burgess Shale beds from Emerald Lake a couple of years ago, and we pondered the idea of going on one of the guided hikes to see the fossils. This trip offered us the perfect opportunity and we were delighted that Merewyn was also interested in going along. Parks Canada warns people signing up that it's a long, strenuous hike but for us it falls into "moderate day-hike" territory :-) Mind you, having just done nearly 30 km in the two days before, I had some misgivings on the morning as we hauled ourselves out of our tent before sunrise...

But we needn't have worried. It was actually a pretty easy hike on the whole, though I do tend to find long hikes more tiring than steep hikes. I remember reading in Gould's book about the steep scree slopes above the treeline in the Rockies, and it sounded so risky. At that point I never imagined that one day I'd actually find it quite easy to make my own way up there! The quarry was perhaps a little underwhelming but it did give me an appreciation of how hard it is to find good fossils: you have to shift and sift a whole lot of rock to find the good specimens. We were free to explore for the better part of an hour, and though I found a few fossils I was, at heart, a little disappointed that I didn't find any of the "classic" species, such as Marella or Anomolocaris. (I've since learned that most of these specimens are in collections at the Royal Ontario Museum and in the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.) But at the end of the day, that didn't really matter: it was a treat to visit this amazing place, with its amazing views.

I have to say I think it was well worth it. More photos from the day are on Flickr

Marella

Day 103: Watering holes

We began the day drinking cold lightly-carbonated water from a hole in the ground, and finished it by drinking cold lightly-carbonated beer at the Noble Pig brewhouse. The Ray mineral spring is like a small water volcano made of travertine, precipitated calcium carbonate. The water bubbles up constantly and flows out of a narrow channel onto the surrounding meadow, which has effectively been paved with the dissolved minerals.

The short hike to the spring was almost mosquito-free, but at the spring itself (at the edge of a boggy meadow, admittedly), they were out in force. We still made time to sample the water, which was pleasantly fizzy with a metallic aftertaste. We all found it intriguing enough to go back for a second, third and fourth handful, and lamented the fact that we'd left our water bottles in the car. We'll know next time.

Having had enough of the mosquitoes we turned and headed back to the car. Maria was in front, Merewyn close behind with me then Andrew a few metres back. Maria rounded a bend in the trail and came to a dead stop, suddenly saying in a loud calm voice "Hello bear!" We all ground to a halt, and I have a vivid mental picture of a healthy-looking medium-sized black bear standing in the middle of the narrow trail, barely 10 feet in front of Maria and Merewyn. I fancy it had a surprised expression but that's probably just my imagination. We retreated a few metres, maintaining our raised voice banter of "Hello bear", "Just letting you know we're here", "Sorry, didn't mean to startle you" for a minute or two before venturing around the corner to see if it was still there. The bear had calmly moved off the trail into the undergrowth, snapping a few branches as it went (perhaps as a show of displeasure). We hurried past saying farewell to the bear, and I could make out its ears among the leaves and branches as I walked by. I snapped a photo but you really can't tell there's a bear in there :-) I think that was our closest bear encounter to date.

A hole in the ground