Monday, June 20, 2005
Fire on the Elbow (2 Grizzlies and a Wolf)
Last Tuesday, in the brief spell of nice weather between two big rainstorms, Dr Robson and I took the head-staggers and took a sudden day off. The house was quiet as our visitors were in Banff, so we decided to head off up the Elbow River and see how K-Country was getting on with all the flooding.
We headed out on Highway 1, then turned south on Highway 22, skirted Bragg Creek (evacuated only a few days before due to the Elbow River flooding) and headed west on highway 66 to the end of the Elbow. The road was open, as it's officially summer here now that May 15 has passed and the gates have been unlocked:
Then - early April
Now - mid-June
We stopped off at the Elbow Falls for lunch - the river was much higher than we had ever seen it before, really a raging torrent of muddy water, and had come over the banks, flooding many of the riverside picnic areas and washing many of the paths away:
Collapsed path
There were also rapids where none had been before:
Rapids
The Elbow comes to a narrow point at Elbow Falls, and splits into two streams which come together at the top of the Falls before plunging down. It's normally a small waterfall, but now you could hear it roaring from half a mile away. When we went in the summer, they looked like this:
Elbow in the summer
Now they looked like this:
The Raging Eblow
Boling torrent at Elbow Falls
Although there was a guy who was perched just above them on a rock, sitting motionless as the river raged. It was a bit of a Zen moment.
Zen man and the River
The river was in full flow - it's really hard to imagine where so much water comes from all at once! And it keeps on coming, hour after hour, thundering over the Falls. This weekend, the flow rates in the Bow River were up from their normal level of 100 cubic metres per second to 2,000 cubic metres per second and the Elbow didn't look too far behind!
It was lunchtime, so we decided to find a dry firepit and get the sausages on! It' illegal to burn any of the wood (live or dead) you can find in the Rockies, so we bought some firewood in Tuscany so we could get a fire going.
Lucky enough, Dr Robbo is an experienced pyromaniac, having had to cook over an open fire for years as a Girl Guide, so we soon had a fire started with newspaper and matches:
First fire
Unfortunately, the paper burned up before the wood had taken light properly, and our fire just smouldered a bit.
The Firestarter
We gathered up some kindling and shavings of dead wood from the ground, and combined with a small candle, these did the trick. Soon we had a good blaze going and it was time to break out the sossies:
Going well now
Sossies on the fire
Lunch is ready
We'd also brought some hot water with us so we could have a cup of tea by the fire:
There were a few other people who had come along to have their lunch beside the river, and they all remarked on the fire. I thought they might have been after a spare sausage or two, but there were none left!
After a couple of hours the fire was burning well and giving off a good heat, but it was time to head off a bit further up the road. It's very bad form to leave a fire burning or even smouldering out here (don't want to start a forest fire!), so we had to douse it with several thermos-fulls of water from the flooded picnic area beside us before we left.
Fire's Out
We drove right to the end of Highway 66, out as far as the Harold Chapman Bridge, but we didn't stop for too long, as we were the only souls in the area and there was a very clear grizzly warning posted. We has also seen an RCMP bear-spotter team down the road scanning the hills for signs of grizzlies, so we didn't hang about!
Watch out, there's a bear about!
There was also a flood warning sign up, as the bridge led across the river to a fishing area (which is why the bears like it there, I suppose):
Beware the Flood
Trout, Char, Grayling, etc.
Not wishing to encounter a grizzly on our own (someone did last week in Canmore, and is now pushing up daisies), we headed back down the highway to Forget-Me-Not Pond, which is quite beautiful, and again not another sinner to be seen (but no bear alert here, so we should be OK, right?):
Where is this?
Um, I forgot...
Like the new sunglasses?
Stepping Logs
We finished up our jaunt by stopping off at a Beaver Lodge:
A beaver lives here
Gnawed by beavers
On the road back, we stopped where the RCMP spotters had been just to see if we could see what they were looking for. I didn't see anything at first, but then Eagle Scout Robson saw what they were after, a cream-coffee coloured big shaggy thing with a hump on its back, lumbering about on the hillside above us. It noticed us and turned to take a look at us looking at it, but soon lost interest and shambled away over the crest. We took a few photos, but all we got was a small brown blob on a green background:
The bear on the hill
Close up of the bear (he's the brown blob below the line)
At roughly the same time, Simon and Sandy were up at Lake Louise, taking video of another, more impressive grizzly:
Big Bear
Before we got home again, EagleEyes Robson spotted another wild creature, a wolf at the treeline:
Mr Wolf
All I can say is that I picked the right woman to marry - what more could a man ask for? Able to start a fire in the wilderness, and adept at spotting dangerous animals from 100 paces? Dr Robson, frontierswoman, I salute you!
We headed out on Highway 1, then turned south on Highway 22, skirted Bragg Creek (evacuated only a few days before due to the Elbow River flooding) and headed west on highway 66 to the end of the Elbow. The road was open, as it's officially summer here now that May 15 has passed and the gates have been unlocked:
Then - early April
Now - mid-June
We stopped off at the Elbow Falls for lunch - the river was much higher than we had ever seen it before, really a raging torrent of muddy water, and had come over the banks, flooding many of the riverside picnic areas and washing many of the paths away:
Collapsed path
There were also rapids where none had been before:
Rapids
The Elbow comes to a narrow point at Elbow Falls, and splits into two streams which come together at the top of the Falls before plunging down. It's normally a small waterfall, but now you could hear it roaring from half a mile away. When we went in the summer, they looked like this:
Elbow in the summer
Now they looked like this:
The Raging Eblow
Boling torrent at Elbow Falls
Although there was a guy who was perched just above them on a rock, sitting motionless as the river raged. It was a bit of a Zen moment.
Zen man and the River
The river was in full flow - it's really hard to imagine where so much water comes from all at once! And it keeps on coming, hour after hour, thundering over the Falls. This weekend, the flow rates in the Bow River were up from their normal level of 100 cubic metres per second to 2,000 cubic metres per second and the Elbow didn't look too far behind!
It was lunchtime, so we decided to find a dry firepit and get the sausages on! It' illegal to burn any of the wood (live or dead) you can find in the Rockies, so we bought some firewood in Tuscany so we could get a fire going.
Lucky enough, Dr Robbo is an experienced pyromaniac, having had to cook over an open fire for years as a Girl Guide, so we soon had a fire started with newspaper and matches:
First fire
Unfortunately, the paper burned up before the wood had taken light properly, and our fire just smouldered a bit.
The Firestarter
We gathered up some kindling and shavings of dead wood from the ground, and combined with a small candle, these did the trick. Soon we had a good blaze going and it was time to break out the sossies:
Going well now
Sossies on the fire
Lunch is ready
We'd also brought some hot water with us so we could have a cup of tea by the fire:
There were a few other people who had come along to have their lunch beside the river, and they all remarked on the fire. I thought they might have been after a spare sausage or two, but there were none left!
After a couple of hours the fire was burning well and giving off a good heat, but it was time to head off a bit further up the road. It's very bad form to leave a fire burning or even smouldering out here (don't want to start a forest fire!), so we had to douse it with several thermos-fulls of water from the flooded picnic area beside us before we left.
Fire's Out
We drove right to the end of Highway 66, out as far as the Harold Chapman Bridge, but we didn't stop for too long, as we were the only souls in the area and there was a very clear grizzly warning posted. We has also seen an RCMP bear-spotter team down the road scanning the hills for signs of grizzlies, so we didn't hang about!
Watch out, there's a bear about!
There was also a flood warning sign up, as the bridge led across the river to a fishing area (which is why the bears like it there, I suppose):
Beware the Flood
Trout, Char, Grayling, etc.
Not wishing to encounter a grizzly on our own (someone did last week in Canmore, and is now pushing up daisies), we headed back down the highway to Forget-Me-Not Pond, which is quite beautiful, and again not another sinner to be seen (but no bear alert here, so we should be OK, right?):
Where is this?
Um, I forgot...
Like the new sunglasses?
Stepping Logs
We finished up our jaunt by stopping off at a Beaver Lodge:
A beaver lives here
Gnawed by beavers
On the road back, we stopped where the RCMP spotters had been just to see if we could see what they were looking for. I didn't see anything at first, but then Eagle Scout Robson saw what they were after, a cream-coffee coloured big shaggy thing with a hump on its back, lumbering about on the hillside above us. It noticed us and turned to take a look at us looking at it, but soon lost interest and shambled away over the crest. We took a few photos, but all we got was a small brown blob on a green background:
The bear on the hill
Close up of the bear (he's the brown blob below the line)
At roughly the same time, Simon and Sandy were up at Lake Louise, taking video of another, more impressive grizzly:
Big Bear
Before we got home again, EagleEyes Robson spotted another wild creature, a wolf at the treeline:
Mr Wolf
All I can say is that I picked the right woman to marry - what more could a man ask for? Able to start a fire in the wilderness, and adept at spotting dangerous animals from 100 paces? Dr Robson, frontierswoman, I salute you!
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