... try and find us

There are many beautiful places in the world.  This is one of them. As part of our year of staying (sort of) in Canada, we are venturing into a few of the places close-by that we have been meaning to get to for forever.  Many, many times we have driven by the turnoff on Highway 1 that leads to Lake O'Hara.  The parking lot twelve kilometres past Lake Louise is as far as anyone can get in a private vehicle.  This being winter, we donned cross-country skis as well as backpacks for the eleven kilometre trek into the lake. The out-and-back route - click for a bigger view. Starting with some uphill ... ... and more ... We only decided to make the trip in a month prior.  Some friends from the running group (Pamela, Grace and Jim), joined us on a Tuesday morning at the trailhead at 11 am.  The fire road is undulating uphill with a solitary picnic bench just past the 5 km marker.  The trail twists and turns through the valley south of M...

The move to Canmore means that some of our closest neighbours live on the Morley Reserve and are members of the Stoney Nakoda First Nations .  Taking advantage of the wonderful resource that it ArtsPlace, we enrolled in a 10 week Stoney Nakoda Language and Culture course. The course is run by Buddy Wesley who is one of the knowledge keepers of the Wesley Band from Morley.  Stoney Nakoda is an oral language spoken by around 3000 people in Alberta.  In recent years, a writing system has been developed with an alphabet and a series of rhyming syllables.  Unlike English, these are always pronounced the same way. Vowels are pronounced: a as in father e as in cafe i as in ski o as in go u as in blue â, î, û - nasalized But the huge challenge is that no structure for learning the language has been developed.  There are no verb conjunctions, dictionaries or spelling protocols.  It is rather fun to start to recognise words that we are familiar with a...