Friends and dinosaurs

Life here continues with the same routine. Mark skis five days a week and rests his legs at weekends (read - sits on the sofa and shouts at the TV). He's thrown my routine this week as he's had two days off having skied the weekend with Blair and Jeremy. As for me, I go out walking everyday (even in the arctic-like weather we've experienced this winter - although I've not been moving too far the last few weeks due to a fall on the ice and twisting my back), distributing posters around town for events at the ArtsPlace, choir practice and baking.

So it has made a nice change having visitors over the last month. Kevin joined us for two weeks and when they weren't on the mountain we did the tourist thing and visited a few places in and around Banff.

Cave and Basin is at the site of natural thermal mineral springs and is the birthplace of Canada's National parks, now known as Banff National Park.

The pools were closed in 1975, restored ten years later then closed again in 1992. There are many naturally occurring hot springs in the Banff area that flow through Sulpher Mountain. We visited Banff Upper Hot Springs which is just an outdoor pool but is featureless, unlike Chena in Alaska, Liard River hot springs in British Columbia or Mataranka Thermal pool in Australia's Northern Territory all of which were natural.

On the way back down into town I spotted a pair of elk grazing on the banks of the river

Next stop, Lake Minnewanka, a glacial lake and at 21km long it's the longest in the mountain parks of the Canadian Rockies. As you can see, Kevin was walking very gingerly as the paths were slick with ice

As it was very icy, on the way back to the car Mark suggested I walked across the hardened snow instead of the path. All was going well until all of a sudden the snow wasn't that hard anymore and in that fraction of a second, I sunk down to my thigh. I think the shocked look on my face said it all.

A few days after Kevin went home, Blair and his brother Jeremy came for a visit. As they didn't arrive until the evening, we went to Drumheller for the day to see the dinosaurs. It was a bit out of our way when we crossed Canada a few years ago in the summer and we had always wanted to visit. The Royal Tyrrell Museum, named in honour of Joseph Burr Tyrrell, a geologist who accidentally discovered the first reported dinosaur fossil in 1884 while searching for coal seams (later named the Albertosaurus), has around 40 dinosaurs and over 110,000 fossils. Here are just a few of the exhibits:

Now its back to a normal routine and counting down to going home...