Category: Canada
Into the 2020’s
1st January 2020 2019 had its share of preoccupations, both political and professional, and I did get out and about more during the first half of the year than the second. Weather had its part in that as much as those aforementioned preoccupations but the dividing line appears to be my trip to British Columbia in July. That also needed recovery from jet lag together with financial restoration.
Before all that, there were numerous trips to Yorkshire and Scotland between February and May. The Yorkshire outings took me around Settle and Malham after a visit to the North York Moors near Great Ayton. Easter was spent around Edinburgh with excursions to Linlithgow, Peebles and Penicuik getting me out into more natural surroundings on a sunny weekend that rather spoiled me. Subsequent return visits in May even featured a return to Stirling as well as another stopover in Linlithgow.
The Canadian trip was the highlight though and my base in Vancouver allowed for plenty of exploration around the city itself as well as fitting in side trips to North Vancouver, Squamish and Vancouver Island. The introduction was so thorough that I struggle to think of an excuse to return and there should be plenty of those as long as I figure out how to spend time on any associated long flights.
To some, 2020 is not when the new decade begins but popular opinion is not awaiting 2021. For me too, a certain wistfulness has descended and I look back to 2000 when I began my career and 2010 when I changed jobs. The 2010's have been life changing too and unwanted political developments to come in 2020 will bring more change. For that reason, I am not planning very much and will see how the year goes.
It this was 1990 or 2000, my sentiments would be more optimistic since that was the world view at the time. However, all that has dissipated and popular dissatisfaction is causing all sorts of upheaval. Throughout all this, it is important to keep a sense of perspective so it is likely that sunny days will lure me out of doors like the last days of 2019. After all, my late mother left me with a constant desire never to waste bursts of sunshine.
We appear to live in a time when making one's own new happy experiences is never more needed and then there is the necessity to share them. Distractions in 2019 have lengthened the trip report backlog though I am writing one at the moment. As I now look to 2020, that motivation is one that feels sound even if I largely will let the opportunities come to me. Then, less of them get wasted and more stories are there to be told. If a few are uplifting too, that will be even better.
Going transatlantic
3rd August 2019 A North American outing always seemed a long shot yet it has come to pass. My base became Vancouver in British Columbia so it was a Canadian escapade too. It might have been that all the Canadian reading of spring, summer and autumn of last year made the trip an eventuality in the end. The next step was to find a usable base for making use of just such a thing.
It also turned out to be one where much had to be learned for this was my first transatlantic leisure trip and there only was a business one to Delaware as a predecessor. Dealing with time zone differences that meant that so much of the day was outside of normal European business hours was another consideration as was the subsequent ongoing reacclimatisation to the home time zone afterwards. It was for that reason that I bookended the trip with a few work-free days before and and after going for the purposed of preparation and recovery.
There was a certain trepidation too because I used the services of an airline that I had not known before though that became an unrealised fear when it was boredom during the flights that turned out to be the bigger intrusion. Being to tired to read meant that I got to observe others binge-watching videos and cartoons on the online entertainment system when the scenery underneath us did not attract attention. This needs rethinking for future long haul air journeys.
In Vancouver itself, finding one's way about the place meant getting to know its superb urban transport system composed of frequent bus, rail and ferry services. City parks are in abundance too and some are large enough to occupy entire days. It is very possible never to leave the city with all there is to be found there, especially when you consider that I was there for only a week.
Still, that left enough time to find my feet and get used to the very different time zone. Stanley Park saw visits the first and second days of my stay before I left the city to go on a day trip to Vancouver Island. That took me to the provincial capital of BC, Victoria, and offered sights of the islands that we passed on the way there. The third day was spent in Vancouver where a visit to Pacific Spirit Provincial Park accompanied the decision to purchase bear spray in advance of some hiking.
There were two hiking days and both were without bear encounters and I was not disappointed for I overcame another fear. The first of these took me into the Lynn Valley near North Vancouver on a day when temperatures reached around 28° C. Nevertheless, I was under forest cover most of the time so that shielded me a little while I ventured as far as the Norvan Falls while fitting in a loop around Rice Lake. The next day took me to Squamish where my rambling took in Alice Lake Provincial Park along with a broader sweep of the countryside surrounding Garibaldi Estates and Garibaldi Highlands on another warm sunny day.
With my hiking days behind me, the bear spray was handed into Vancouver Police Department Property Office in advance of my return home after a satisfying and packed stay in Canada. There was much to learn and much to experience and warm sunshine was the main weather type. In a lot of ways, I only scratched the surface of what was there but it was a good threshold to cross and the countryside was as good as anything that I have found elsewhere. Once I work out what to do during those long flights, a return visit cannot be discounted.
Of anniversaries and birthdays
7th May 2018 A warm sunny bank holiday weekend may be a rare thing but I have not been lured out and about. In any event, temperatures have risen a little too high for what I call comfortable walking and other preoccupations have overtaken me. Still, they have not been all-consuming so I have not passed the twelfth anniversary of my setting up this blog after a May Day bank holiday trip to Scotland that took in Lochaber, Inverness and highland Perthshire. Sometime in June (the actual date itself is lost to me) marks the twentieth anniversary of my setting up a website for the first time and November is when my public transport website reaches its tenth birthday.
It goes without saying that a lot has happened during these time intervals. Family and work circumstances have changed while my explorations of hill country have become more international; the process of recounting my Norwegian wanderings is an ongoing project. There have been new beginnings and false starts but life has continued in its many ups and downs. The need for constant supply of new and happy memories has been made plain to me as my explorations continue.
Finally, I have got to reading Graham Wilson's Climbing Down and I have other books by the same author to keep me going after that. Guidebooks to parts of North America as well as New Zealand have been perused in the off chance that my wanderings may become intercontinental. Canada's western reaches have their scenic allure together with a hint of danger added by the presence of bears and other wild creatures. It is my intention that those readings continue as I rediscover the necessity of reading books from cover to cover in place of dipping in and out of certain sections. Any way that adds an extra overview has its place. They have added thoughts of visiting Vancouver Island and the Canadian Rockies while any prospect of going as far as New Zealand is more of a long shot.
Before all that, there is a possible venture in my working life that will need setting up if it comes to pass. Once such a thing is place and things are more settled, my hope is that my outdoor explorations will continue. After all, May is the best time of year in Britain and Ireland and I hardly want to let that slip by me if I can help it. Longer outdoors outings may not have happened since February for a variety of reasons but there should be more of the year left for such pursuits. Life's adventure continues.
A longer reading project
11th February 2018 Over the years, I have been prone to buying books with good intentions and then hardly getting around to reading them. This has been known to apply as much to paper books as their digital counterparts, and I have been getting through a backlog of the latter since last autumn.
The reading material itself has been varied with travel writing from the likes of Dan Kieran, Bruce Chatwin and Jack Kerouac seeing inclusion along with other subjects covered by the likes of Clive Aslet and Christian Wolmer. Among these have been works from Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, with the latter featuring through every month from last November until this one.
What I have discovered is that reading nineteenth century prose takes more effort than what is found today. Sentences feel longer and have more packed into them. The same applies to paragraphs that spread from one page to another. Even so, there are rewards in revisiting observations from another time, for the sort of descriptive writing from centuries ago is more of a rarity today.
Returning to the Scottish naturalist and conservationist John Muir, my chosen task was to work my way through an extensive compendium of his collected works along with a volume in tribute, and it is that which is the main subject of this post. In the U.S.A., Muir remains a revered figure and someone who appears to have fitted much into his lifetime, too.
It was not just a childhood spent in Scotland prior to a move to Wisconsin, either. Still, that childhood was severe, with corporal punishment at home and school to go with schoolboy scrapping. Throughout all of this, there was a growing love of nature that was to define him. Engaging in that persuasion often got him punishment from his father yet he and his brother continued regardless. Such things were regarded as straying away from the path of Christian righteousness.
The hardship continued in North America, with lots of hard work to build up a block of farming land from what was wilderness. Still, the appreciation of nature grew, and there even was time spent inventing various clocks and other contrivances. That time was made by getting up part way through the night, an act that bewildered his own father.
The inventions were to see him heading away from home on an early trip to a fair, and that was followed by four years spent at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Though a degree was not gained, there was plenty of mental enlightenment that preceded a time of factory working that was ended by an accident that nearly blinded Muir.
It was after recovery from that incident that he began his long walk to Florida by way of Kentucky and Tennessee. Along the way, he had plenty of time for observing natural beauty before a bout of malaria laid him low. Though he made it as far as Cuba, the intended journey to South America had to be abandoned in favour of one to California that took him via New York.
It was his explorations of the High Sierra that would make his name. Yosemite, King's Canyon, Hetch Hetchy and other such spectacular valleys would allow him to investigate the effects of glaciation. Mountain tops like Mount Shasta would see him climbing them, even when the weather was not that hospitable. One incident on Mount Shasta got a repeated telling. All the while, his health improved and his strength advanced as he observed grand fauna like the giant Sequoia trees endemic to California. Variations in weather were much experienced too, with storms being relished; when most of us would stay indoors, he would be heading outside. Quite what people must have made of this and his other exploits would have made interesting reading, not unlike what some write in our own times.
From California, he went north as far as Alaska, while also visiting Oregon and Washington State too. The Grand Canyon was another place that he visited, as was Yellowstone National Park. His trips to Alaska had him exploring glaciers with a view to seeing how their action related to what he saw in California. As well as Muir's own published accounts, Samuel Hall Young also published his own tribute to the man with whom he too explored places such as Glacier Bay. Muir embarked on a summertime sea journey to the Arctic as well, so he got to know Alaska and neighbouring parts of Russia better than many at the time.
There was one trip back to Scotland later in life, and he also appeared to get to other parts of Europe, as well as Asia and South America. Before all this, he married and settled down to run a fruit farm, though that was not his real calling. His wife often sent him away to mountain country to get his fill of the wild places that he so cherished.
That love of nature must have turned him to conservation, for he was one of the founding members of the Sierra Club, an organisation that continues to exist today. It also was reflected in his writing, for he campaigned for National Parks and decried the effects of sheep grazing on wild meadows. Lumbering was not seen as a legitimate activity always, nor was the building of the railways. It was after an unsuccessful campaign to stop the building of a reservoir in Hetch Hetchy valley that he passed away.
His legacy has persisted, with people still reading works like My First Summer in the Sierra, A Thousand-mile Walk to the Gulf or The Story of my Boyhood and Youth. These are just a small selection of what I ended up reading over the last few months. There was some repetition along the way, but that probably can be found here too. The nineteenth century prose took some effort to read and things undoubtedly have changed since the times in which it was written, yet there was much to enjoy. In their own way, Muir's books and other writings describe many parts of the world that I have yet to visit, and the effort was worth it for all that. The enthusiasm and alternative approach to life percolated through the narratives too, and the thinking has remained until our own time. Let's hope that it does so into the future.
North American dreaming
3rd December 2016 While recent tidings from North America might have felt foreboding to many, virtual explorations of its wilder corners have been offering some solace in my life since the year began. In its early months, I considered some possibilities for car-free excursions from among America's National Parks. That this is the centenary of the foundation of the the National Park Service over there, the pondering seems more apt. More recently, I began looking at the wilder corners of New York state like the Catskill Mountains and the Adirondack Mountains as well as the Finger Lakes and even Niagara. There may be an article elsewhere arising from those efforts too.
That is not complete and I even started to ponder Canadian escapades too. After all, you find National Parks like Banff and Jasper among the Canadian Rockies that line the boundary between the provinces of Alberta and British Columbia. Both Vancouver and Vancouver Island have come to my notice too and Canada is going to suspend charges for entry its National Parks in 2017 as part of its sesquicentenary (150 years) of its founding. That has been enough to get it to the top of Lonely Planet's Best in Travel country list for 2017. The scenery looks stunning in any photos too so dreaming can continue.
Some travelling by television viewing has happened too, be it a BBC series on the Klondike Gold Rush or one travelling the American railways around eastern states of the U.S. or another following nature's eruptions of beauty during a calendar year. Each of those could either quell or encourage dreaming as could details of logistical realities of North American explorations. Realising quite how wild some of these places are cause more than a little pause for thought, not just for their expanse but also about their wildlife with bears coming to mind.
Maps have accompanied such mental meandering and software from Routebuddy, Memory-Map and Avenza has facilitated virtual ambles over faraway countryside more easily than paper maps ever would. Along the way, my listings of map publishers and software providers have expanded and could have a use for explorations nearer to hand too. There may have time for virtual wandering but its real world counterpart offers more lasting memories. It can be good to dream without losing track of reality, especially during tumultuous years like the one we have had.
