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the other day I saw a bear

Atop a mountain this past summer, backcountry camping for three nights an eight hour hike from civilization, I spent an hour each day keeping up my writing by scribbling narratives of our daily advenutres into my smartphone. This is one of my entries.

day three

Bears have long held a kind of place of abstract mythology in my head. I’ve seen bears. I’ve seen bears in the distance. I’ve seen bears out the car window. I’ve seen bears in captivity. And all thru my life I’ve been taught over and over, with practiced regularity at the start of any adventure into the wilderness the core tenets of bear safety. Yet the bear, at least the bear as a beast of aggression and adventure ruining mischief has stood at this distance of a thing I’ve heard about but never had to deal with. And then, while backcountry camping we are in the position of making that bear drama come to a place of all too reality—in fact we suddenly find ourselves sharing a campground with a bear. A bear came through as we were eating breakfast this morning. Probably that bear has pooped all over the trails.

That same bear was on the path between us and the campsite as we came back from our afternoon day hike and we had to stop for a few minutes and let him wander off to the side so we could pass.

As I lay here in my tent recounting my day, there is the very real possibility that a bear will wander through our site and sniff around nearby as we’re sleeping tonight. This random creature which has been nothing but a subject of stories or a rhyme in a kids song, is suddenly our neighbour and everyone is just kinda okay with that What are we to do, after all?

It’s the bear’s home first, right?

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Local Adventures: Hiking Jura Creek

It’s a long weekend in Canada and so with neither work nor school for anyone on Monday we skipped off to the mountains for some nordic-style fun in the alpine climate.

We travel out there quite often. To relax. To hike. To just be somewhere beside home.

And we always try to squeeze in at least one hike, though hiking in the winter is often a bit more challenging than hiking in the summer.

The week before we left town I hunted down three pairs of crampons, over the shoe ice spikes with steel grips two centimetres deep and enough grip to walk us up any icy path the tourist-grade hiking scene could throw at us.

So we bundled up, packed some snacks and water, stuffed a couple cameras in my backpack, and drove about fifteen klicks out of Canmore to an off-the-beaten-path trailhead for Jura Creek.

In the summer, I assume, Jura Creek is a flowing mountain creek washing down the side of a mountain. The creek bed, frozen during out visit, made for a great short day hike in winter. We hiked up through the water channel, climbing up and over a few small rocks and then out into an open vista with views of the mountains around us.

Jura Creek is apparently named for the false “jurassic” fault line that greets anyone who is able to hike the approximately four klick gradual climb to the first waypoint. As it turns out it is neither a fault line nor appropriately attributable to the jurassic era. Instead, the rock formations which resemble an exposed fault are something else entirely, including a layer of ash from some ancient volcano. It was still pretty, though.

We made the round trip, grateful as always to be back at our car, and refuelled back in town with some local amber-coloured recovery fluid.

Check it out if you’re ever in Canmore.

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vision, start line

Since my modest and cautious update on my knee injury a couple weeks ago, I’ve actually been making some measurable progress in both healing and beginning my re-training.

Then a few days later I went to a tour showing of the Banff Film Festival.

I’m not clever enough to make a proper film, but I do think I have an interesting story to tell as I recover and train for Chicago in October.

So I made a video:

The first of a series, I hope. The introduction to a happy conclusion, that too.

It’s a commitment to try and publicly document something difficult like training for a marathon. But it also commits me to training and trying harder to compete the story.

It’s gonna be a crazy year!

Check it out and give it a like to help me get some interest.

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Knee-hab (January Update)

I ran last night.

Not much.

But I ran. Outside. On a trail.

And I can still walk this morning.

If running three klicks through on a random Thursday evening in January sounds less than impressive, let me introduce you to my Medial Collateral Ligament injury and the fact that I haven’t had a pain-free run outside or beyond the confines of a physiotherapy-prescribed treadmill run in over six months.

I pushed myself back in September in the park near my house and ended up limping home and elevating my leg for nearly a week.

This morning, fourteen hours later, I feel pretty normal. Good. Strong. Hopeful.

Back in July of 2022 I injured my knee ligament.

I don’t know how. I don’t know when. I don’t know why. All I know is that one day I was running and training and planning adventure runs through the city. The next day I was struggling to climb a few steps in my house.

I figured a couple weeks recovery.

After a month I went to see the physiotherapist.

He told me it may take a couple months, but maybe as long as four months.

It’s been six months and I’m finally feeling like there is something resembling hope in a recovery.

It was -15C on the trails.

My crew meets sporadically but regularly at an elementary school parking lot near an access point a ravine.

In the spring, summer and fall it’s a beautiful asphalt trail descending into the river valley under a canopy of big old trees.

In the winter, its dark and icy and hauntingly creepy.

I recorded a walking tour there just last week and the view hadn’t changed much to last night, except that I was plodding along at one minute run to one minute walk intervals, and listening to the crunch of my feet through the dark forest trail.

My four companions kept my pace for the first of my one minute intervals, but then I purposely slowed and they dashed ahead. On my second interval I almost felt like if I pushed it I could catch up with them. On the third interval they were little more than bobbing headlamps in the distance and by the fourth I had descending into a canopy of eerie trail that was as much like a haunted pathway towards some frozen hell below as it was the scene of my running recovery run.

At eleven minutes I made a u-turn and returned to my truck, logging exactly three slow kilometers of winter plodding and setting the stage for a “now we wait to see how I feel in the morning” scenario.

And?

And?

I already spoiled the lede, of course. I feel fine this morning. I can still walk… have walked. Gone up and down the stairs a dozen times and…

I have an appointment with my physiotherapist tomorrow. Now I need to fess up that I pushed the program. I suppose it all worked out tho, huh?