When people refer to the “light at the end of the tunnel,” they are often meaning that their current situation is akin to being trapped in a tunnel, but that the end of that situation is in sight.
Me? I like tunnels. I used to ride the LRT system for the fun of it, just to kill some time, or as something to do while needing to think for a while. I didn’t care where the light was, I just wanted to enjoy the ride.
I’m thinking of changing up my website again. Yeah, I know, this iteration isn’t even that old. But I’m rethinking what I want to get out of this site, as an extension of rethinking the direction I want to take my photography (and I guess myself to some degree).
Keeping this blog updated with the progress of my 52-week project (or, you know, at all) got away from me. But for those left hanging, I completed this project in December, without having missed a single one of the weekly Flickr Friday challenges. Not that I was happy with all of the shots that I got, but I learned a lot along the way and I’m proud of how much it has helped me think more creatively.
I’m going to keep doing Flickr Friday for a while to keep me challenged and shooting, but I will also be participating in some bigger challenges this year (think: the kind that will take one month to plan, shoot, and post-process). There will always be more to come!
After our lovely stay in Waterton, we headed west and then east. Our first destination was the Crowsnest Pass, mis-spoken as Crowfoot Pass (Dave) or Crowsneck Past (me). “Past” is apt, though, as there is a lot of history here!
One of the many wind turbines dotting the area
Our first stop ended up being unplanned, when we decided to check out Lundbreck Falls, conveniently accessible just off the highway near the junction of the Cowboy Trail and the Crowsnest Highway. There’s also a provincial recreation area and campground which looked like a great spot to stay at.
Dave at Lundbreck Falls
Further west, the highway is dotted with communities making up the municipality of Crowsnest Pass: Hillcrest, Bellevue, Frank, Blairmore, and Coleman. Our first destination was Blairmore, the commercial centre of the area, for lunch at Stone’s Throw Cafe. We settled at a window table with a chai latte and a pumpkin spice latte, enjoying the view and feel of a small mountain town. Our lunch consisted of veggie and cheese wraps and Thai chicken soup, which hit the spot!
Crowsnest Pass
Crowsnest Pass is also full of former mining towns, none more famous than Frank. In the wee hours of April 29, 1903, the north face of Turtle Mountain broke away, burying the eastern edge of town, the CP rail line, the river, and the coal mine in 90 million tons of limestone. Frank Slide is regarded as the most catastrophic rock slide in Canadian history. The site is largely untouched aside from being cleared for the highway, a rail line, and the river, although the mountain is continually monitored for signs of instability under the belief that the south face is likely to collapse at some point in the future.
Turtle Mountain and Frank Slide
We were impressed with our visit to the Frank Slide Interpretive Centre, where we learned about the geology and history of the area, the factors leading to the slide, and the actions underway to minimize the fallout from a future slide.
Our next stop was in Bellevue, where we took a coal mine tour.
Mining is Serious Business
This mine opened just after the Frank Slide event, and closed in 1961. Our tour covered 300m into the mine – just 1% of the original mine tunnels; most are now flooded. Even at that short distance and depth, it was cold and dank, but at least the 50s-era headlamps powered by Wii-sized battery packs were a major improvement from the gas lamps miners would have used originally.
Safety Lamp
I couldn’t imagine spending all day down there!
We drove to Calgary that afternoon, stopping in Okotoks to pick up sushi rolls from the always-delicious Yokozuna, to share with some close friends while we played fun games of Boss Monster and Wrong Chemistry.
The next morning, we headed to Lethbridge. Alberta’s fourth largest city is built around the Oldman River valley, which is steeper, narrower, hillier, and grassier than Edmonton’s densely treed North Saskatchewan River valley. The highway in to Lethbridge from the west enters the city through the valley, giving it a very dramatic feel. Our High Level Bridge also has nothing on theirs – theirs is the longest steel trestle bridge in the world at over 1.6km long and almost 100m high. It is an impressive sight!
Below the viaduct
We went for lunch with some coworkers of mine (we are all remotes) that afternoon, walked around downtown, then took the short drive to Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, another UNESCO World Heritage Site. This is another place filled with history and the knowledge amassed by generations of local aboriginal tribes is amazing. Can you imagine killing a beast like a bison with little more than animal skins, trees, and rocks, let alone an entire herd of them? The interpretive centre is a great testament to these people and their way of life.
Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump
Lethbridge has a large Japanese population, so we’d be crazy not to go for sushi! The food at Lighthouse was well-prepared and delicious. After dinner we went to try to take bridge photos before the sun set, but we didn’t find a good vantage point in time. We set out the next morning with a location in mind, and enjoyed a walk through the scrub. It’s a different place, all right – there are little cacti around, we saw (and heard) a bald eagle high above the valley, and we disturbed a bullsnake enjoying the sun (another case where everyone was startled!). He fled to the grass, although we met up again on our way back.
A fleeing bullsnake
Dave and I have a tradition with our aforementioned Calgarian friends, dubbed “Bluegrass Weekend,” in which we spend a weekend together sightseeing in southern Alberta, listening to bluegrass music. Bluegrass Weekend 2014 went to the birds!
No time to explain!
Quick, grab a duck!
We met up with our friends at the hotel, and then made our way to nearby Coaldale, home of the Alberta Birds of Prey Foundation. We got mobbed at the duck pond, picked up a few a few poor birds (pictured above), enjoyed a Bald Eagle demonstration, and I got to play perch for a Great Horned Owl!
Owls are Serious Business
There were even birds hanging around in the gift shop, a trio of Barn Owls, a Merlin, and a Burrowing Owl.
We enjoyed a delicious dinner that evening at Rics Grill in the Lethbridge Water Tower.
After dinner, we made another trip to try and get sunset shots of the bridge, and lucked out to arrive the same time as a train!
One last look at the bridge
The next morning at the hotel, we couldn’t say no to an included breakfast, nor could we resist the allure of popular pancake printer! Watch the video below to behold the glory of the pancake printer in action (not our video):
We stopped in Calgary briefly for a couple of Sumo dogs at Tubby Dog (complete with “wasabi bombs”), then made our way back home.
We were only gone for a week, but we did so many awesome things that it felt like a much longer trip. We definitely want to further explore many of the places we visited! I’m not sure when exactly we can make it back, but we will return.
We went to renew our passports in July and answered the inevitable question of where we were going – “Montana!” It was amusing to say it with excitement – Montana is not a place that drums up a lot of enthusiasm. The name literally means “mountainous”, though, and we’d get to leave the country on a vacation – reason enough for us to make a day of it!
Mountains not unlike these
I took to the Goog for recommendations, and found that Going-to-the-Sun Road was nearby. It’s the only road that crosses Glacier National Park, taking 11 years to build and opening in 1933 at a cost of $2.5 million ($45 million in 2014 dollars). It’s about 50 miles (80 km) long, and open from early June (or as soon as the tonnes of snow can be cleared) to October. The road is a National Historic Landmark and a Historic Civil Engineering Landmark, and it’s named after Going-to-the-Sun Mountain on the east side of the park.
The night before we headed to the states, we opened the trunk of the car and remembered the half-case of mead we’d brought back from Fallentimber that we left in there – whoops, best not to try to cross the border with that! Needless to say, it stayed behind in the hotel.
We had planned to take the free shuttle to cut down on vehicle traffic, however we realized that we wouldn’t be able to see the entire road and made a hasty decision to drive it instead. That may seem like an easy decision, but what you might not realize is that the road is very narrow and literally cut into the side of the mountains. The limit is 25 mph (40 kph) in the alpine sections, and with good reason; on a switchback two-lane undivided road even this was too fast sometimes! This is not a drive for the faint of heart – but we drove the entire road westbound in one go, planning to make stops on the way back.
Going-to-the-Sun Road – follow the narrow line running across the mountain on the left!
Apgar Village is just off the west side of Going-to-the-Sun Road, on the banks of beautiful Lake McDonald – it is entirely a resort community with a popular campground, a couple of hotels and gift shops, and Eddie’s Cafe.
Eddie’s
We shared a couple of sandwiches: a chipotle chicken which was good, and a battered northern whitefish which was amazing. Both sandwiches were toasted – the crunch of the bread and the soft interior followed by the crunch of the breading and the flaky fish filet… Again, I’m salivating just thinking about it!
Lake McDonald at Apgar Village
Everywhere we went huckleberries were prominent, so we couldn’t pass up huckleberry cobbler with huckleberry ice cream. Scientists have not been able to domesticate this plant, it seems, so all the jams and desserts and candy would have been made with wild huckleberries. We were unimpressed at first – “aren’t they the same as saskatoons?” Huckleberries and saskatoons are unrelated, as it turns out, with similar flavours and huckleberries being larger and sweeter. Ironically, we only ever saw wild huckleberries in Alberta…
Huckleberries (in Alberta, not Montana)
The gift shops at Apgar are also interesting – one of them is literally built around large cedars. We shopped at Montana House, which offered lots of locally-crafted products. We have a few September birthdays in our family so we like to go gift shopping on vacation!
Our next stop was Logan Pass, which is the highest elevation reachable by car in the park and an extremely popular site. There’s great hiking in the meadows, and this would be the habitat of the pika, but we made do with chipmunks and ground squirrels, and we went chasing waterfalls.
Chipmunk at Logan Pass
St, Mary Falls is just west of St. Mary Lake and a short hike off the highway. There are three separate tiers – we ended at the second due to time constraints, and it was very rewarding!
Photographing the Falls
Photographing Dave at the Falls
Photographing a couple from California at the Falls
Virginia Falls can be reached from this trail as well, which is said to be even more impressive.
I made one last gift shop run on the way out for more huckleberry jam – I can’t remember the last time I got pennies in my change! The clerk was quite nonplussed at my reaction. We got a few gallons of gas and headed to Johnson’s of St. Mary for dinner, on a hill overlooking the highway.
This place was a real blast from the past – the farm antiques and antlers decorating the dining room were very likely new when they arrived! We had a huge family-style dinner of beef and barley soup, fresh baked bread, coleslaw, mashed potatoes and roast beef, and took some huckleberry lemon trifle to go. I am determined to recreate the trifle with saskatoons!
The hill Johnson’s of St. Mary rests on
We made our way back to Waterton. Did I mention that the highway out leaves the national parks on both sides of the border and enters reserve territory? This wasn’t noticeable in Canada, but on the American side the land is free-range for cattle to graze. We encountered several of them right on the highway driving home – most weren’t too in the way, but half a dozen of them were blocking both directions at one point with another vehicle trying to herd them southbound. Back in Canada, we had a scare as a fox ran across the highway right in front of the car – it froze for a split second right in front of us but disappeared just in time. We were almost as shaken as it was, I’m sure. We saw a second fox in the alley behind our hotel – fortunately we were going much slower at that point.
Road Cow (one of the less bothersome ones)
Going-to-the-Sun Road was the consummate white-knuckle drive and I thought I was crazy for undertaking it in a couple of spots. There were so many places we couldn’t stop at that I’d love to go back for a longer stay, though – perhaps we’ll explore more small-town America on our next trip out!
The drive from Edmonton to Jasper is pleasant, but the densely treed terrain gives the feeling that the mountains come out of nowhere. We drove highway 22, known as the Cowboy Trail, down to Waterton, which was full of fantastic views.
It’s also a pretty easy drive – the road winds here and there but the highway itself is comfortably flat. The road is dotted with little towns, including Bragg Creek (which we were fortunate enough to visit before the 2013 flood with a friend who grew up there), Turner Valley, and Longview. The last of these is the Hamlet of Twin Butte, about 10 minutes north of the park boundary, and we saw a sign for Mexican food off Highway 6. Mexican cuisine seems out of the ordinary in Alberta, however there are many farm labourers from Mexico. The food was fresh and delicious! Stumbling upon local gems is such a treat.
Goat Haunt
We planned our arrival in Waterton Village to start with a scenic cruise of Upper Waterton Lake. The International leaves Waterton Marina at the northern end of the lake, crossing the US-Canadian border and dropping us off at Goat Haunt in Montana’s Glacier National Park. Goat Haunt is only accessible on foot or by boat, and we got to enter the United States without a passport! There is a ranger station and customs registration (with standard entry requirements) for any hikers or backpackers looking to stay longer than the cruise’s short stopover. The cruise was also informative – we learned that the US-Canada border is marked all 6,400 km of its length, encountered fascinating evidence of plate tectonics, and got some helpful local recommendations.
Cameron Falls
Our hotel, Northland Lodge, was on the edge of the village, however it’s no more than a 20 minute walk to the lake. Cameron Falls is at the end of the block – how amazing is a waterfall right in town? We were far enough from the falls for very quiet nights. After a great night’s sleep we had fresh-baked muffins with Saskatoon jam every morning!
Waterton lawn maintenance
There are so many scenic places to visit around Waterton – we bought souvenirs at the Prince of WalesHotel gift shop, hiked around Red Rock Canyon, Blakiston Falls, Cameron Lake (which also ends in Montana), Crandell Lake, and a stepped waterfall on the Akamina Parkway. We didn’t see many larger wild animals –there is a herd of tame deer we first witnessed trying to share a meal at Wieners of Waterton! It’s illegal to feed the animals or harass them in a national park, but sometimes you don’t have a choice…
This guy really enjoyed his job
Wieners of Waterton was a highlight of our trip in itself. I must confess to being skeptical of a hot dog place, but their smokies are custom-made, the buns freshly baked, and gourmet toppings such as sauerkraut, ginger carrots, pickles, and banana peppers are all free! We also ordered fried pickle spears and sweet potato fries with rosemary parmesan, curry ketchup, and chipotle mayo. Just the thought makes me salivate! Later, we enjoyed a sunset walk down the beach and along Cameron Creek.
Upper Waterton Lake sunset
Waterton is also great for its small-town feel. Everyone was friendly (how could you not be in such a beautiful place?), and we enjoyed breakfasts with fellow travelers – we met a woman planning on backpacking in Australia next year and we gave her some tips from our trip in 2013.
Double rainbow
We hit a rainy patch on our way back up Cowboy Trail – as the saying goes, if you don’t like the weather in Alberta, wait 5 minutes! Sure enough, the skies cleared to produce a huge double rainbow. It was the pot of gold at the end of our trip!
We also spent a day in Montana – watch for part 3 on our adventures in America!
At the end of August, Jenn and I took a trip to southern Alberta and Montana. Day one, we drove down to Water Valley, Alberta, to visit and take a tour of Fallentimber Meadery.
I’d first heard of them back in June, at the Edmonton Craft Beer Festival. I took an interest in them right away, given that Jenn and I started brewing our own mead about a year ago. I sampled their products and chatted with Nathan Ryan, whose family owns and operates the meadery. I was excited to learn that they do tours, and since we were heading that direction ourselves knew it would have to be added as a stop along the way.
Fallentimber Meadery is situated in the beautiful Water Valley area of Mountain View County, just a short drive off the scenic Cowboy Trail.
On entering the meadery, you can sample most of their available products (alongside some cheese and crackers), and peruse the mead, honey, and beeswax products for sale in the store while waiting for the tour.
The tour takes you through the meadery as it is laid out, but it is not the order in which the product is made, which is how I will present it to help make sense of the process.
First, you start with bees.
The honey business, Ryan’s Honey, was started in 1969 by Blake Ryan, who built the first hives and started the honey farm. Today, Blake’s son Kevin runs the farm, which supplies the honey to Fallentimber.
Kevin was on hand to teach us all about bees and the honey they produce, including how the honey is extracted from the beehives.
The honey is combined with water and yeast and left to ferment in large stainless steel tanks. Other ingredients may be added to feed the yeast, or to create different variations; for example adding apple juice to create a cyser.
The alcohol content can be controlled by different variables, such as fermentation time. Here, a hydrometer measures the specific gravity (relative density) of the liquid; comparing the SG of the liquid before and after fermentation helps to calculate the alcohol content of the finished product.
After the fermentation process has completed, the mead is typically aged, and may be infused with other flavours such as hops (a specialty of Fallentimber) or oak. Here, some mead is being aged in a steel keg and an oak whiskey barrel.
Once infused and/or aged, the finished mead is bottled, corked or capped, labelled, and packaged for sale. The above bottling machine was hand-made for Fallentimber, as explained by Nathan and Colin.
At the end of the tour, we bought nearly a case worth of mead for ourselves and for friends, and headed back to the Cowboy Trail, to Cochrane.
When in Cochrane, of course one apparently must try MacKay’s Ice Cream. We did.
It was really good.
We stayed the night in Cochrane, which is where I will leave this post. Up next: Waterton!
Canning preserves food by sealing it in an airtight container, to keep it from decaying – aside from the obvious cans, jars and bottles are also used. Not so long ago, growing and preserving one’s own food was more convenient than commercially canned products. There are still plenty of home canners today, but it’s more on a hobby level than for subsistence.
I decided to take up canning a couple of years ago – our 50s-era house has a cold room with plenty of shelving and I had plenty of cucumbers that year.
Canning supplies
I picked up a canning starter kit for $50 from Canadian Tire and some canning jars, which come with one-use lids and reusable rings (250mL, 500mL, and 1L are the most common sizes). Most of my canning has been pickles – cucumbers, green beans, jalapenos, and green tomatoes. Jams and jellies are another popular choice for home preserving, but I find pickling is less work.
As with our mead-making, sterilization is key for home preserving. We don’t want to botulize ourselves! The lids and jars are sterilized in hot water – we had to run the dishwasher anyway, so I loaded the jars in there and ran a sani-wash. The lids I tossed in the canning pot -the jars can also go there as well.
The hot water bath process I’m using is only suitable for acidic foods, with a pH less than 4.6 – pickles, jams, etc. High school chemistry taught me that sour = acid, so I should be fine, right? I’d rather be safe than sorry since I don’t have instructions or experience canning this recipe.
As luck would have it, I’d purchased a fancy digital pH meter a couple of hours ago! We’ve taken a couple of cooking classes from local personal chef Elaine Wilson, who’d recently come to a crossroads and decided to move away from some of the aspects of her business. This meant no longer requiring supplies, and we gratefully rehomed a digital pH meter! It will be helpful for mead as well.
Ready for lids!
The next step is jarring. I fill each jar to 1/2″ headspace (PickYourOwn.org has been a helpful resource, and they have a great primer on headspace), stir out any bubbles, and wipe the rims with a paper towel.
Hot Water Bath
The canning kit comes with a lid lifter, which is basically a plastic wand with a magnet at the end. The lids go on the jars, the rings go on the lids, then the jars go in the pot. They’re sitting in a rack so I can pull them all out at the same time. I only noticed this morning that these are 250mL and not 500mL jars – they only needed 15 minutes, but more time is fine.
The jars come out of the rack with a jar lifting tool. They will sit for 24 hours to ensure that they seal – this happens with an audible popping sound. If anything has not sealed, it can be re-processed with a new jar and lid or put into the fridge for immediate consumption. Everything sealed!
Pop po-op!
Canning is a pretty lengthy process (here’a a PDF outlining everything), but making and preserving your own food is something to take a lot of pride in. It’s not an insignificant investment, in terms of supplies and space, and this is part of what makes it into a lost art. Fortunately, with an abundance of farmers markets during the summer months, anyone can enjoy small-batch food!
Rhubarb is a vegetable people use like a fruit. It grows well in Alberta and a backyard plant or two is common. Its tart flavour pairs well with strawberries and apples in desserts, but it’s also a great ingredient in savoury dishes. A couple of years ago I found a rhubarb salsa recipe in a newsletter from The Organic Box – I can no longer find it online there, but I pull out the printed copy every summer when our backyard plant is ready to be harvested.
I’m canning most of this batch – watch for my follow up post on the canning process.
The ingredients
The ingredients are similar to a standard tomato salsa – onion, green pepper, jalapeno. The flavour of the rhubarb is enhanced with orange zest and ginger and the sourness is balanced with sugar. Some honey and lemon juice finishes it off – I’d normally use fresh citrus, but bottled lemon juice is preferable for canning.
Red, red rhubarb
Rhubarb being tough and stringy, the first step is to slice it all up. I doubled the recipe and ended up using about 12 stalks, but that included one almost as big as my wrist! I deviated slightly from the instructions and tossed the rhubarb in the pot, followed by the sugar, orange zest, and water. I brought everything to a boil, grated the ginger into the pot, and simmered for 5 minutes. The rhubarb doesn’t need to fully break down since the salsa will be a bit chunky.
Ready for mixing!
The rhubarb has a chance to cool while I chop sweet onion, red onion, green pepper, and jalapeno. I used three jalapenos, removing most of the membrane and seeds. This is where all the heat is, so feel free to chop these up as well.
Make sure you only handle the skins of the peppers with your bare hands, though, as the capsaicin will stay on them for a long time, and touching your eyes (or other mucous membranes) really burns! I just put an empty produce bag on the hand I’m holding the pepper with.
Waiting for the flavours to meld…
I canned most of this batch, and we have most of a 1L jar left for eating now. It’s delicious right away, but it will taste better once the flavours have had a chance to meld overnight. It’ll last a week or two in the fridge – if we can wait that long. It’s so tasty we’ve been told we should sell it! Aside from the obvious tortilla chips, it pairs well with pork (as a marinade or topping), or top cream cheese with it and serve with crackers.
I also made a quick rhubarb-strawberry sauce for dessert, from a couple of tablespoons of fresh orange juice (from the one I zested earlier), 4 cups chopped rhubarb, about 1/3 cup sugar, and a bunch of strawberries I picked from my parents’ patch (is there anything better?). I bought everything to a boil, let it simmer long enough to stew, and served with vanilla frozen yogurt. Yum!
2 tablespoons finely shredded orange peel (half an orange’s worth)
6 cups rhubarb, sliced 1/2 inch thick (6-9 stalks)
1 teaspoon grated fresh ginger
1/2 cup diced green bell pepper (half a pepper)
1/4 cup finely chopped sweet onion (half a small onion)
1/3 cup finely chopped red onion (a little more than half a small onion)
1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and minced (leave unseeded for more heat)
2 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons lemon juice
Directions
In a non-reactive saucepan, combine the sugar, water, and orange peel. Bring the mixture to boil over medium-high heat. Add the chopped rhubarb and reduce heat to minimum. Simmer gently until rhubarb is tender, about 10 minutes. After the first 5 minutes of simmering, stir in the ginger. Remove the rhubarb mixture from heat and allow to cool to room temperature. When cooled, add remaining ingredients and mix well. Serve chilled or at room temperature. Makes 4 cups of salsa, depending on the juiciness of your rhubarb.
I haven’t shared my recent FlickrFriday entries in a while. Here’s weeks 15 to 27, which makes me suddenly realize that I’m now more than halfway through this project!
While this one didn’t get FlickrBlogged, it somehow was chosen to be promoted for free on the Daveography Facebook page, reaching 74,432 people and adding over 150 likes for the page!
Continuing on some of what I talked about in my previous post, a couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of attending a lighting workshop put on by the recently-formed Option 8 Studio group.
The instructors were all fantastic at teaching us about lighting ratios, styles, the effects of different modifiers, types of strobes, how to overpower the sun with your own light, and more. They struck an excellent balance between classroom-style instruction and hands-on exercises. And of course, the importance of having a light meter in your kit (I ordered myself a Sekonic L-358 off eBay shortly after).
The workshop really helped to cement my enthusiasm, and the timing was perfect, as I had recently been approached by an aspiring model by the name of Holly who was interested in doing some shooting with me. How could I say no to such a privilege?
Though it was a very simple one, we both had a lot of fun on the shoot, and I think we both learned a fair bit from the experience, since we’re both relatively new to it. I’m looking forward to working with her again sometime soon! (More photos of Holly below.)
After my light meter arrived in the mail, I was eager to use it, and maybe get some more use of the AlienBees monoblocks in the process. So I invited “The Hobos” to come over to my house, and a handful of us did a shoot with the lovely model Andii (who is also a Hobo).
We all got some great shots, Andii was fantastic to work with, and copious amounts of beer plus some really good bourbon and some Jaeger were consumed in the process (no Jaeger for me, though, yuck). Immeasurable amounts of fun were had by all.
The light meter, by the way?
WORTH IT. It removes just about any and all guesswork exposing properly with the strobes. It worked flawlessly, I love it.
So that’s what I’ve been up to lately, and I’ve been having a blast with it.
