A few days of news

Some good things have happened over the past couple of days.

I had a half day of skiing on Saturday and it was very cold - it was also overcast and windy so the apparent temperature was lower than the -13 or so that the thermometers were reading. It is all good and valuable time to be on the skis though, particularly when there is very little visibility and one has to ski using 'the force' and instinctive balance in bumps!

Then in the evening I met up with Carlos, who is a Banff resident I met on a bus back from Canmore last week. We had a pretty raucous night out in Banff and I met a few of his friends who are mostly environmental scientists. A really interesting crew and very welcoming for a newbie to the town. The night did get a little out of hand I will admit and I finally charged up the mountain to the hostel sometime around 3.30 am...

Needless to say there was no early start on Sunday and instead of heading downhill I very willingly accepted an invitation to go XC skiing with my new friends. I am really excited by the idea of getting into regular cross country skiing as it is such a nice way to get out into the quiet of the forest without the chairlifts and the crowds and still be on skis. Given our condition, and Carlos' and my general lack of experience, Chad and Sonja (Carlos' friends who acted as our guides) took us on a nice easy trail along the side of Brewster Creek. It was a magical feeling to be schussing along through the pines, working my lungs in the crystal cold air.

A view down the Brewster creek.
Carlos, Chad and Sonja

We ended the night by all going into town for a beer and a meal where I met some more locals and had an all-round good time. A few are interesting characters who have made a major career change to come to the rockies and work in and around environmental sciences and conservation. It is nice to be able to see some good end results from making such a change. One guy is now working for Parks Canada, I think as the main wildlife specialist for Banff. He started his career as a massage therapist and after a number of years completely re-trained and studied while working and now is out in the forest almost every day of his working week.

Today, I did something really great. I organised to go down to Boundary Ranch in Kananaskis to visit Rick and his family and have a chat about opportunities for a young outdoor hopeful like myself! I got up early and made the trek down into town in the biting cold (I didn't have my ears covered and they were really hurting.) I hired a little tin-box car and drove down to Kananaskis (about an hour from Banff) in the beautiful crystal clear morning. The drive down was spectacular as the sun was just gracing the tops of the mountains and tipping the white monoliths with a pinky hue. Unfortunatley I discovered on the way that I had forgotten the memory card for my camera, so the images cannot be shared but it was a euphoric feeling to be out on the road by myself, enjoying the quiet of the early morning.

Kananaskis is in the less extreme foothills of the Rockies and is increadibly beautiful in a slightly less rugged way than up here at Banff. There are far more deciduous trees and the mountains are just slightly less imposing. I met Rick and after he had shown me some of his increadible hunting trophies from around the world (including almost every globally huntable sheep species, several grizzlies and some very impressive moose, caribou, mule and whitetail deer and mountain goats), we headed off for the block of land about 50km away where he keeps his horses in winter. The scene in the valley where the horses had been corralled was wonderful. We had to travel down a few kilometers of snow covered forest tracks that finally opened out into a glade where his 100 head of horses were blowing steam into the morning air from the holding pen. His daughter and stockman had already caught up the horses and then together we all worked for most of the day to individually catch them all into a halter and give them their worming drench/trim up their hooves and general check-up. The impressive thing was that each of the 98 horses was known to the crew by name.

In the evening I had a good talk with Rick about advice for me and he thinks that the Guiding School would be a good thing to do. He offered me a position with his outfit after I had finished if I wanted it, probably just taking groups around on the short rides and helping as a stable-hand/wrangler around the ranch for the summer. He also offered me a job in the early spring if I decided not to take the guiding course and just learn on the job, in which case I would probably be at around the same place with the horses by mid-summer, but would be a general farm hand to start with and wouldn't have the extra hunting component in my training.

So, good things to mull over and think about. In the meantime I will now re-focus on getting myself a skifield job for the winter and decide what to do for the spring and summer. At the least, it was great to be talking ot a local hunter and I think Rick will be a great contact to have even if I don't end up working with him.

Tomorrow all the original inhabitants of our dorm room at the hostel are going up to Sunshine together for a day of riding together - should be good fun!