The Scientist: May 2008

Handsome bro

My brother sent me this picture of him, taken on Sunday when he was on parade with the other Army Reserve crew. It was the first time he had worn a skirt, and he described it as "breezy".

As it should be...

A few weekends ago when I was visiting Garrett, we relaxed around his house for an afternoon.

Garrett, hard at work, waxed his car in the warm afternoon sun.

And here I was:

Mmmm, juice! Ahhh...all is right in the world.

Garrett's new wheels

Garrett's new wheels, which he bought to match my car (just joking).

It's fantastic!

New car

1996 Mazda Precidia, bought off of my bro for a good deal (even with the repairs I needed to get to pass the Alberta inspection). Here she is:

Here is the dirty dirty shape my brother gave her to me in (sorry Kyle, but she was filthy!):

I cleaned her up (inside and out!) and now she's good to go!

Ha Ling summit

On Monday, Garrett and I zipped into Canmore and did a popular hike up Ha Ling peak (better known as Chinaman's peak, but they renamed it so it would be more politically correct. However, no one knows what I'm talking about when I say "Ha Ling Peak"). The hike is listed as an easy scramble, since the first half of the hike is trail-bound, but once you get above the tree line you can scramble where ever over the shale.

On the drive up, we saw some shaggy mountain goats.

The hike itself was about 800 meters in elevation gain. After about 400 meters, we were above the treeline. We stopped just below the treeline and before a bunch of snow and ate our lunch. This little birdie came to visit us while we ate.

Garrett took some pictures of me as we rested on the trail.

This is looking down the valley to the east.

We continued hiking up (us, and about 40 other people too) to the peak, where we looked over a steep cliff onto the town of Canmore.

Since I'm a little bit afraid of heights (ironic, hey, seeing as I climb mountains all the time), I refused to get any closer to the edge than this.

Garrett was braver than I, but the picture I took doesn't do the view justice.

A lady at the top took a picture of the two of us together.

Once we reached the top, the weather finally started raining on us, as it had been threatening to do since we started our hike. We got pretty wet, since we were completely exposed up there.

The way back down was more treacherous than the way up, since the rain had created a lot of mud that stuck in the grooves of our boots. I slipped several times and got pretty dirty. Once we were back in the car and driving back to Canmore, we stopped to take a picture of the mountain we'd just climbed. Here it is:

We were waaaaayyyy up there!

Horseshoe Canyon

After completing our tour of Dorothy and Rowley, Garrett and I stopped in to hike around Horseshoe Canyon just west of Drumheller. We descended into the canyon and wandered around for about an hour and a half. Here are some pictures.

The terrain reminds me of this videogame I used to play with my brother and some friends from Vancouver. The game was called "ChronoTrigger" and there is a part where you travel back in time to the Caveman Age. The characters wander around in terrain that looks exactly like that seen in Drumheller. I used to love that game.

Here's Garrett.

Here he is again.

Again.

Garrett again.

Hmm...too many of Garrett, maybe?

Here's one of me!

Here I am, jumping across a gap in the path.

And here are some general terrain shots.

Ghosting around town

I went down to Calgary for the long weekend. On Saturday, Garrett and I went on a tour of the eastern Alberta prairie region on a quest to complete his photography class assignment. His final assignment was to hand in 5 photographs that were related somehow, and he thought that it would be neat to take some shots of prairie ghost towns. We looked up the location of some Alberta ghost towns and found two that were fairly close to Calgary - Dorothy and Rowley. We jumped in his new X-trail (photos to come!) and headed into the fields!

Our first exciting find was an old shed on a small prairie highway. A lot of the old buildings on the highways are part of people's yards, so we couldn't really visit those, but this old shed was on its own beside the road. We pulled over and got out of the X-trail, excited to find not only an old shed and barn, but a classic car parked in the shed!

Garrett took some pictures and we continued on, making our general way to Drumheller and the canyonlands around there.

Dorothy was about half an hour east of Drumheller and was very very small. There were only two houses there that people probably still live in. We parked the car and walked around, taking a picture of the grain elevator there (I took this one).

There was another old car kicking around in Dorothy too. I took this picture and fiddled with it in PhotoShop so it looked cool.

Then Garrett went and took some nice, fancy camera pictures of the car and other sights in Dorothy.

Aside from the grain elevator and the old car, there was also an old church in Dorothy.

The townspeople had started to restore the roof of the church, so it had new wood shingles, but I think it still looks pretty neat despite that.

This is a picture of the door on the church. I love the texture that Garrett was able to pick up.

There was also another old building across from the church, which I'm guessing was a school house. We were able to go inside and wander around (well, as much as we could wander in a one-room building).

I was momentarily worried that the school house might not be structurally sound enough for us to go inside, but it was really quite fine. It had the old fashioned plaster walls, some of which was falling off. Pretty neat!

As we headed back along the highway from Dorothy, we also stopped at an old trestle bridge in East Coulee. Garrett took this shot before we headed into Drumheller to eat our picnic lunch:

Next, we continued North of Drumheller to the town of Rowley. Rowley was quite different from Dorothy because the townspeople there have put a lot of money into maintaining the old buildings and the main street. It's almost a little more cheesy, because it's maintained so well - there are also weird things like mannequins in the windows of some of the old stores that makes it cheesy. More people "live" in Rowley, too, although I think most of the residents just have those houses as summer cottages. We talked to some of the people there as we wandered around and took some pictures. Apparently they had just received a large grant to start fixing up their grain elevators, since the three elevators are one of the only set of three left in the province.