Slip-sliding away, eh.

So, I've been in Canada just over 8 months now, and winter's starting to ease off a bit now. Temperatures have actually made it as high as 7 degrees lately, and I'm so thoroughly acclimatised I genuinely think that this feels warm. It's amazing what just one Canadian winter can do to you.

I've spent most of the last month in the Rockies, which were just as beautiful in the winter as you'd expect. I did stop briefly in Calgary on the way from Winnipeg, didn't do much there except go for a short 2 hour walk that ended up lasting 10. I couldn't help it though, I saw an interesting hill in the distance which I couldn't resist taking a look at. Turned out to be very distant and after all that walking I managed to strain my knee in some way which left me limping around for the next week or so. With all the ski-related injuries in the Rockies I blended right in though, it probably gave me some extra street cred too.



First stop in the Rockies was Canmore to meet up with my friend Helen, who I met way back in Vancouver. We picked up my other friend Sandra in Banff (who you might remember I'd travelled with a lot back east, and will be seeing yet again up north) and pop up to the Banff Gondola on Sulphur Mountain (Helen got us free tickets, yay) to see Banff all covered in snow. Then it was another hour down the road to Lake Louise for Ice Magic, the annual ice sculpture festival held at the Fairmont Hotel. This was really great to watch over the 2 days we were there, seeing the pieces being worked on right through to the finished products, which looked great lit up at night. We also got to walk (or limp, in my case) across the frozen lake, which is always novel.







I went back to Banff for a week after that. It was a beautiful morning when I arrived, one I won't forget in a hurry after missing the bus and hobbling up the hill with my bags in -35 weather as my whole face pretty much iced over (it's always a bit concerning when your nose starts to feel kind of crunchy when you move it). I tried to take it relatively easy that week and let my knee recover, but I also couldn't resist revisiting some of my favourite places to see them in winter - Bow Falls, the Hoodoo trail and especially the Vermilion Lakes. Caught up with some more friends too, in fact these days I hardly go any time at all without seeing someone I know over here. In Banff I ran into Sally purely by chance, I'd caught the train from Halifax to Ottawa with her, and also met up with Fiona from the Salty Bear tour back in Nova Scotia.



After Banff it was back to Canmore where I stayed at Helen's place for a week. Canmore's quite a nice town, it's just outside the national park so has less restrictions on development and is more residential in nature than tourist oriented Banff. A lot of the houses are only used as weekend homes by Calgary residents though so it's often pretty quiet and with lots of good hiking trails it's definitely somewhere I'll be revisiting to explore further. I actually did take it pretty easy here, only did a little bit of hiking (mostly trying in vain to track down the herd of about 30 elk that everybody else in town seemed to run into daily) so my knee finally got better.



Next stop was Edmonton for 2 nights, just to have a quick look on my way to Jasper. Edmonton seems largely unexciting to be honest (their main claim to fame is the world's largest shopping mall, but I'd already been there on my first trip over here). Plus it was -40 when I was there and it's just painful being outside in that weather, even my iPod refused to operate properly. I actually found myself bathing my hands in the relative warmth of inside a refrigerator at one stage because it seemed so much warmer to my painfully cold hands.



Anyway, it was a huge relief to be back to a more comfortable -10 (no, I really mean that) in Jasper, where I stayed with Ben, another Salty Bear alumni. With my knee only just back in action I promptly slipped crossing a particularly icy street and so was left with a very sore tailbone and bruised ass for the rest of my time in Jasper. I blame the fact that I'd talked to Ben about going cross-country skiing, it seems everytime I even think about going skiing I manage to injure myself or get sick beforehand. The first time I slipped on a glacier and hurt my knee, then I got the flu when I considered trying cross country last time I was in NZ. It was pretty annoying (I've still got my bruise), but I ended up doing some snowshoeing and cross country skiing anyway. Snowshoeing is great fun, when you first strap them on you feel invincible, almost like you're floating along on top of the snow. After a while it's hard work though, as you you've got the extra weight of the shoes and you do sink into the the snow if it's soft enough. We went up to Patricia Lake just above Jasper, and it was pretty special standing out on the lake in just total silence. Cross-country was alright too, it's definitely more my kind of skiing than downhill, and it doesn't hurt that much when you fall down as you're not going fast. Unless you've got a pre-bruised tailbone to fall on, which isn't fun. But even though I was hardly a picture of grace but I definitely enjoyed it.







One of the highlights of the Rockies was the icewalk I did in Maligne Canyon. I'd been there before in the summer and it's an amazing place, a very deep (up to 50m) and narrow canyon with about 5 waterfalls and really strong rapids. In the winter of course it's all frozen so you can actually walk right down through the bottom of the canyon. A lot of the water comes from caves in the area and so seeps out of the canyon walls, creating huge ice formations. It was pretty spectacular, being able to walk there in the first place but also going right up to and even around behind some of those huge formations. Saw plenty of elk around Jasper too, they tend to hang around town so between the elk and icy sidewalks you really had to be paying attention wandering the streets of Jasper.





After that it was time to hit the road again, this time to the great white north - the Yukon. Had another stopover in Edmonton on the way for a few hours - just enough time to make it to the Video Games Live concert, where a whole bunch of music from different games is performed by a symphony orchestra and choir - it was pretty awesome (and yes, probably just as nerdy as it sounds), they had everything from old stuff like Space Invaders and Super Mario right through to big orchestral pieces from Halo and Final Fantasy. After that little taste of culture it was back on the bus to head north though - 30 hours it took to get up here to Whitehorse. It was a really nice drive though along the Alaska Highway, which is surrounded on all sides by thousands of kilometres of complete wilderness. We also had to cross the northern ranges of the Rockies, and even though it meant 2 nights on the bus I was lucky enough to have an almost full moon again so could still enjoy the view at night.



Whitehorse is brilliant, it's exciting just to know that you're way up north (I just love mentioning that I'm in the Yukon and have been casually dropping it into conversation all the time), and it really feels like you'd expect to be up here. The first day I was here I caught the finish of the Yukon Quest dog sled race, a 1,000 mile journey over about 10 days from Fairbanks to here in Whitehorse, so that was pretty neat to see the first 2 mushers get in. Spring's almost upon us too so each day the ice on the Yukon River has broken up a little bit more, it's beautiful to see with the deep blue and turquoise water running over the ice. Tomorrow morning it's off to Alaska, Fairbanks first, which is one of the best places in the world to see the northern lights so I'm hoping they put on a good show while I'm there. Not sure how long I'll be in Alaska just yet, will be catching the start of the Iditarod (another big sled race) so will stay at least a few weeks and then probably come back here to Whitehorse for a bit so I can figure out where I'm heading next.