A tale of two journeys: The South

4000km covered, two mountain ranges crossed and a LOT of big trees. The Jeep has performed admirably on 17 days of travel on two road trips: south along the washington and Oregon coasts to California and north along the misty fjords of British Columbia. 

The South

When Nikki said her only free week was early June, my colleagues' warnings about the potential for  'Juneuary' rang alarm bells. With huge amounts of snow across the western mountains this winter, any kind of hiking was out as many places still had avalanche risks. So with Nikki's Canadian cousin Shelagh on board, we planned a journey along the famous (well, in these parts anyway) Oregon coast; long sandy beaches, rocky bluffs and plenty of wildlife.

A complex visa waiver run in with the US authorities was avoided thanks to my boss's timely warning and Nikki's disarming British chatter.  Torrential rain on night one luckily wasn't represenative of the trip (although the other night of rain did necessitate a retreat from the tent to a yurt) and there were plenty of highlights:

- Incredible long, sandy, undeveloped beaches with tons of picturesque driftwood and rocky out crops. Leftie liberal Oregon decided to keep its 350 miles of beaches public and much is protected as state parks.

- Yet again the vindication of my incessant questioning of locals re wildlife opps: rewarded with immense star filled tide pools, huge colonies of seabirds, seals and sealions and lots of teetering on slippery rocks

- Beer (oregon is the microbrewery capital of N America), ice cream (where else to celebrate Nikki's birthday but with 57 flavours) and everlasting home made cookies

- First encounter with US police in the form of a speeding ticket for Nikki (okay, maybe more of a lowlight for her bank account) in Kurt Cobain's home town - once you've left Eugene as quickly as you can its not hard to see why he was so miserable

- An unexpected sense of remoteness; in crescent city, CA, you're 350km from the nearest big city and cut off from the freeway by the mountains.  They don't follow baseball or ice hockey but the local little league soccer and it felt like the whole town, all generations, attended the trivia night.

- And finally: our first encounter with a real life US marching band, replete with trombones, baton spinning and glitter outfits.

So much fun was had by all in the journey south.  You can check out the photo album here:  Oregon highlights

Next instalment covers the journey north...

Whales, wine and the first bear of 2012

Most Canadians only get 10 days annual leave, 15 if you're lucky. So the 'long weekend' assumes huge importance as a chance to get away and into the outdoors (well, I'm sure some of them use it to visit the Home Depot but the sensible ones go camping).


Luckily long weekends crop up almost every month (much more sensible distribution than the UK) and we've made excellent use of the first two of spring:


Easter time whale watching

Sunset, West Coast style

On the way to the west coast of Vancouver Island (just "the island" to Vancouverites) we had a whistle stop visit with my awesome first cousin twice removed, Chris Pielou (my only known relative with her own wikipedia entry E.C. Pielou wiki entry).  Still hiking and writing books at 87, she is a force to be reckoned with in the sleepy seaside town of Comox and I was touched to be given a signed copy of the latest reprint of her first popular science book 'The World of Northern Evergreens'.  I'm still sorting out my spruces from my pines but I'll get there...

Yes, we think it did walk there

The island's west coast bears the brunt of the northern Pacific Ocean's wind, waves and, with amazing frequency and force, rain.  So we had low expectations of a dry weekend on the drive over (particularly as there was still about 3 feet of snow on the roadside on the passes) and much time was spent rigging up a complex tarpaulin arrangement.


But actually, it turned out pretty nice.  We walked on the huge expanses of sandy beach in the Pacific Rim National Park, watched grey and humpback whales, saw our first sea otter (!) and cooked up on the beach in an amazing sunset.  No coastal wolves yet, but there's always next time...


Wine tasting and rock

Baby vines at the Nichol vineyard

The long weekend towards the end of May heralds the start of Canadian summer.  Proving this wasn't yet firmly embedded enough in our psyche, we headed to the major summer destination in B.C without a campsite reservation.  And, predictably in hindsight, they were all full by the time we arrived in the Okanagan (300km east of Vancouver) at about 11pm after hours escaping the 'burbs so we put a motel night on our flexible friend.


All was resolved by morning, just in time to start out tour of B.C. vineyards.  Little did we realise that the Canadian wine that makes it's way to the Vancouver liquor stores is the bottom of the barrel and they actually produce some excellent wine, particularly whites.  I pretended to know the difference between Bordeaux and Burgundy style and Mark's savvy actually got us some 'below the counter' tastings.  With temperatures in the high twenties, clear blue skies and acres of dry vineyards it felt very European and totally unlike our home turf.  

So they DO put the signs in the right place

We were just about sober enough to run and climb the following day and have a mini night time safari to try to spot bighorn sheep (no luck, but we did see a well placed deer). On the way home the first bear of 2012 made an appearance looking a bit dazed from hibernation.  And luckily dazed enough not to charge a the family of 6 who ran towards it from their SUV...


So, summer has begun (though it's raining as I type this) and next stop is the 300 miles of beaches of Oregon.

Spring has sprung on the West Coast...

Downtown & Island mountains

It's not really a 'Canadian' winter in Vancouver; it only snows in town a few times a year and it's certainly not cold enough for the pond ice hockey they have further north.  But it's still nice when it finishes, so to mark it's passing here are some of our winter highlights (and, unfortunately, lowlights):

• We both learnt to ski.  My initial advantage of 2.5 days of skiing 5 years ago quickly faded as Mark applied his normal training dedication and obsessive internet browsing to   improve his technique.  It was lots of fun until...

• Mark ruptured his posterior cruciate ligament (PCL, twin to the more commonly torn ACL) on our 'final run' at Whistler at the end of February.  Walking wasn't very easy for the first week or so but he is now back in action with some light hiking and running with a mega carbon fibre knee brace.  He might need an operation when we get back to the UK, but we're still planning lots of adventures (just with a bit less brutal downhill)  

Me post race with running buddies

• I trained hard for my first 25km trail race on the North Shore mountains.  The 1700m elevation was pretty punishing, but not as much as tweaking my knee on the final stretch - bit of a limp home but still really pleased with my progress.  Next up is another 25km race in May in preparation for the big one, 50km, (12.5km straight up a mountain, eeek!) in August.

• Despite occasional 'Baker days' (when you can see the huge and snowy Mt Baker 100km away in Washington State), it rained A LOT, which I guess at least topped up the reservoirs...

• We had our first visitor, the fab Nicky Smith who had just finished being very clever at a 'ski conference' in Colorado (where there was no snow) and then almost drowned in powder (the rain does have its uses at altitude) at Whistler.  And she reports our sofa bed is pretty comfortable for anyone planning a visit....

From Bowen Island

So, that was our first Canadian winter, next year we will try to get somewhere properly cold (I asked someone from the Yukon Law Society if they were having nice weather in February and she said 'yup, it's been above -40degrees for 3 days' now so think we need to try a bit of that...).  We've already made our first camping expedition for 2012 (see next post) so hopefully we'll have many more sunny days to come... 

Yellowstone in Winter: part 2

Flushed with our success of day one, we happily attended the pre-briefing for the rest of our stay, a 3 day wildlife viewing tour led by a former Park Ranger, Anastasia.  We saw an incredible amount throughout our 3 days, here are some of the highlights (not really in reverse order, but definitely ending with #1)...

- Bison up close and personal, blocking the roads a few times, banging heads and generally looking massive.  The guys have much bigger horns than the girls and giant woolly afro hair-dos, although its the ladeez that rule the roost.  Seeing them in the falling snow was not just a bit like being in a David Attenborough doc.  


- Beaver casually swimming down a tributary of the Yellowstone River.  Our first sighting outside of Vancouver and apparently a first for our guide in the park.


- Lots of lovely fluffy coyotes, on the hills, in the long grass and, best of all, watching them listen intently for mice under the deep snow and then leaping through to catch them.


- Huge amounts of elk, every wolf's favourite fast food on hooves, all around the park... which means you also get to see elks after the chase.  Not quite so pretty, but good to see not much goes to waste.

Before

After

- Pronghorn 'antelope' venturing outside the park (pretty brave considering you can buy guns on pretty much every main street and there ain't much else to do 'cept hunt)

Basically an African Savannah

- Wolves, wolves and more wolves:  After our initial success we thought it would be pretty easy to spot them, but the next couple of times they were about half a mile away, only really visible through telescopes.  But on our last afternoon, news of a kill near the roadside reached us.  Despite it being New Year's Eve, we headed to bed early (after a hot tub in the falling snow) and met the another couple from the group (who were both super nice and happen to live in North Vancouver) at 6.30am the following morning.  We headed to the river and gazed at the hillside in the pitch dark straining to catch a glimpse of a furry canine.  After an hour we were losing hope, but then we saw them, wolves on the ridge.  We watched them lounge around after their late night dinner of elk for over 30 minutes only a couple of hundred metres away. So entrancing that we all forgot to take photos!

-  But even that wasn't the #1 highlight.  On our second day, as we stopped at a regular wolf watching haunt we noticed everyone was even more silent than usual.  As soon as we got outside we realised why; the magical sound of a pack of wolves just off the road in the woods, howling in unison.  Much more mournful than we imagined it might be (partly as they may have been trying to cross the road!) and you could clearly hear the different wolves 'voices' at different pitches.  Magic. 


All in all, an immensely good trip.  We're returning in the summer on our road trip round the Western States so let us know if you want to come along for the second look!  

The Park: Yellowstone in winter part 1

Okay, enough about getting there.  What about Yellowstone, made famous by Yogi Bear (remember Jellystone Park?) and an awesome BBC 3 part documentary (basically the reason we went).  


A few quick facts:
- Created in 1872 it was the first national park in the US, and the world.
- At 3,500 square miles it is about 4 times the size of the Lake District
- It sits on what was once the biggest volcano in North America and acts like a giant deep freeze in winter
And...
- Its northern mountain ranges and valleys are (pretty much accurately as it turns out) described as the 'Serengeti of North America'


(WARNING: Look away now if you aren't interested in detailed nerdy wildlife spotting descriptions, read on if you love knowing how to tell bison boys from bison girls...)


The first afternoon

What are they eating up there?

The huge stone gate welcomed us to the Park and within about 4 minutes we spotted our first wildlife; a small group of Bighorn Sheep grazing (though I'm not sure on what) on the steep rockfaces right by the road.  Much more powerful looking than domestic sheep, they didn't seem phased by us, but lucky we stopped for as long as we did as the other times we saw them they were specks in the distance. 

He followed in our footsteps

Feeling pretty pleased with ourselves, we took a short walk from the car in the snow to check out a nearby valley.  We disturbed a large herd of elk (basically red deer but also a bit stockier and with thicker coats) grazing and, as we turned back to the car, a coyote was sneaking over our tracks to a nearby viewpoint.  Our first carnivore!  No photo (don't worry, you'll see them later) but the first of many animal prints in snow of the trip.

Mark was only allowed about 5 minutes to drink coffee when we checked into the hotel in case we missed any other wildlife action.  But as we'd be leaving straight after our wildlife tour we thought we should check out one of the parks 'thermal features' (it has half of all the world's geysers, hot springs, mud pools etc).  The terrace of springs right by the hotel was awesome, huge clouds of steam in the cold air and funky thermophile bacteria coating everything in pyschadelic colours...


Then it was back on the wildlife tour.  Our next encounter was with a group of bison, photos later.  If you've seen buffalo in Africa, think of something bigger, shaggier and with a huge shoulder hump comprised not of muscle but bony fins extending up from the spine.  The hump helps them sway their huge heads through the snow to clear patches to get at the grass underneath.  Seeing them in the falling snow was magic. 

Look hard and you'll see him centre left

But let's be honest, you all know the real reason we were there; to catch a glimpse, just a glimpse, of a wolf as it is supposed to be the best place in the world to see them.  And that's exactly what we did next.  Turns out that there are group of wolf watching devotees in Yellowstone, and if you see their vehicles you are pretty much guaranteed a sighting.  

A much better, but not mine, piccie

Not knowing this, we casually stopped at a roadside pullout and quietly asked the people with huge telephoto lenses if there was much around.  'Have you seen the wolves yet' they replied, pointing at a black and a grey wolf lounging in the snow just two or three hundred metres away... Awesome.  Okay, my photo is rubbish, but you could seem super well through binos!    


to be continued....
  

The Journey: A Tale of two "Cities"

Up close it's even cheesier

900 miles, 3 mountain passes over 3000 feet and sub zero temperatures; would our 18 year old Jeep make it to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming...?


Well, she did a magnificent job (aided by good weather) and so, slightly to our disappointment (but not my mum's) no hair-raising tales of nights spent on the road surviving only with the warmth of tea lights.  Instead, I thought I'd tell you the tale of two "cities" (anything in Canada or the States with at least one store, one diner and one bar seems to qualify as a city, see population figures below...) we passed through on our journey which neatly demonstrate the Old and New West...


Butte, Montana  Population: 34,000 and shrinking (but still Montana's 5th largest 'city')

Yes Mark, it really is closed now

A boom town in the 19th century for gold, silver and then copper in huge quantities, Butte was one of the largest cities in the American West for decades.  Our hotel was 40GBP and was an art deco masterpiece of chandeliers and original tiling and built by a 'Copper King' who made mints of money from the local mines (one of which is located just off downtown and is now the 'largest toxic lake in North America'.)


With none of the high-tech industries of further East, and not quite close enough to the mountains to be an outdoors centre, the future for Butte on a sleety December night certainly didn't seem pretty.  That said, they are trying to clean it up and as the whole of downtown could be instantly transformed into a Western shoot-em-up stage set, complete with original designed-for-purpose brothel (the longest in continuous operation in the States), saloons and intact mining machinery, couldn't someone just buy it and turn it into a giant theme park?  And the old vault turned restaurant did do great burgers. 


Moses Lake, Washington  Population 20,000 and growing

The roads are veeerrryyy straight

We weren't looking forward to our stay in Moses Lake, our Lonely Planet-esque guidebook only cited it as it was straight off the interstate highway.  Surrounded, unexpectedly for us in our ignorance of American geography, by miles of flat desert, the Lake part was only created when the huge Columbia River was damned to create a series of irrigation reservoirs in the mid 20th century.  


And, actually, it was quite nice; flocks of over wintering geese and resident herons on the lake and a brilliant 'pizza parlour' (okay, the book was right about the 'dense and unusual toppings' part but Mark didn't seem to mind the 4 types of meat on his).  The town doesn't have much of a history, but with investment from tech companies for data storage and a new factory producing solar panels, the future seemed pretty bright (tee hee) and the local paper was full of the new job opportunities and improving health and education facilities.  

The real Roslyn from Northern Exposure

With almost every town we drove through full of buildings with historic preservation orders slapped on them, the US is trying to preserve its (short, some might say) history and I really hope it succeeds.  Although the new West with its techy stuff and boxy malls looks more prosperous it definitely does not look as fun as frontier saloons.  

The start of a (not really proper) Canadian winter

What Vancouverites call winter is definitely upon us (all other Canadians think Vancouver is where the wusses move to to escape months of minus temperatures and several feet of snow).  Here is some of what I've been up to as the thermometer starts to drop:

Skiing
Our first lesson was back to basics, I remembered a bit more than I thought I would do and Mark was obviously best in class.  His first foray onto the nursery slopes showed an admirable tolerance of high speed on skis, and less ability to turn.  Much hilarity ensured (for me anyways).  

Okay, not me yet, but watch this space...

We've now progressed to a full green run (they have a different grading system here so greens include European blues as they don't have reds) and a very nice lift attendant has helped me (mostly) conquer my fear of chair lifts.  Ridiculously we can be on the slopes for mid week night skiing by 7pm so hopefully will get in plenty of practice, especially on days with powder and once we get good, we'll hit Whistler... 

This is me..and v nice experienced snow shoer, Caitlin

Snow shoeing
Just discovered this today; basically huge plastic things attached to your feet with inbuilt crampons to help you walk on snow without slipping or sinking.  Super easy once you get used to the feeling and good way to keep training uphill through winter.  Sliding down on your bum is also very fun, although not sure my 'pants' enjoyed it as much...






Eagle watching
Turns out salmon don't just taste great smoked with lemon and black pepper but play v important role in the forest eco-system.  Eaten by bears, eagles and other animals after they've died post once-in-a-lifetime spawning lesson (some species have no luck) their decomposing bodies also provide nutrient to the trees. 

Seems all mums give in to whingeing teenagers

Bald eagles are particularly keen salmon eaters; we headed to Squamish last weekend to one of the best place to see them.  We watched around 15 eagles just across the river, a couple casually 'caught' a couple of they dying salmon for a lunch time snack.  Although we've been lucky enough to see lots of bald eagles now, they don't fail to disappoint with their incredibly 'eagley' faces and special pyjamed white legs, although their calls do sound like strangled sea gulls (and in films gets dubbed over with the much more 'eagley' sounding red-tailed hawk).  Sorry my camera isn't up to much, but next time Dan snaps one I will pop it up.  

Christmas preparation!

Despite living somewhere surrounded by fir trees, real trees are banned in our apartment, but got a great fake tree and spent last weekend making decorations and getting the rest from the dollar shop (nice ones only, obv).  Thanks to the folks already have a pile of pressies under it so feeling Christmassy.  Canadians seem to take it pretty seriously although interestingly no one EVER refers to it officially as Christmas, it is always the 'holiday season' and if you didn't know, you wouldn't guess it had an religious association at all.  Suits me fine although I will miss the Brownie nativity!  We leave on Boxing Day for our trip to wintry Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming so plan to spend Christmas Day skiing...


Will keep you posted on skiing and other antics and expect a major update post Yellowstone adventure, fingers and toes crossed including a very out of focus blurry shot of a real life wolf!