Category: general

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canada general

the three sisters – canmore edition

I was walking past this viewpoint with someone the other day and saw people randomly pointing cameras off into the distance taking photos. We couldn’t work out what on earth they were taking photos of, until we remembered the mountains.

 

 

On another note, car doors are sometimes surprisingly heavy. It was 5.30am and I was sidling into the passenger side of the van, with the door only just open as there was another vehicle parked closely. I’d just dropped my bag into the foot well when the door gently swung closed. On my head. This led to pain and concussion and tenderness. I don’t recommend it. That was over two days ago and my head still feels a bit tingly.

Categories
canada climbing general

lake lousie

The weather’s taken a turn for the unpredictable recently – weather forecasts keep looking promising, then turning to scattered showers the day beforehand, and the day in question ends up being miserable and rainy. And that’s exactly what happened when I tried to finally climb at Lake Louise.

 

Views of Lake Louise (ski resort), Lake Louise (chateau) and Lake Louise (lake – filling up with people in canoes)

 

There was low cloud lurking through the Bow Valley, and all the way along the drive there.

“It’ll be fine!” we said. “At least it’s not raining!” we said. The rock was horribly cold and uninspiring. The longer you spent on the climb, the more warmth was sapped from your fingers and your toes, so instead of warming up you’d just get colder and colder, until you couldn’t really feel your fingers at all, and your big toes were definitely quite numb (possibly your next toes too, and some of the others). You’d have to place your feet and hands visually and hope the hold was good enough to stick to, as it was just impossible to tell by feel.

 

Walking into the crag

 

By the time we finished the second climb (which was actually quite fun climbing on Arapiles-style horizontals) it was a little warmer. Perhaps we would keep going. But then it started to rain. We retired to town for hot chocolate and brownies.

Categories
general

they’re selling my town!

Well, not exactly. But sort of.

 

 

Currently the government is buying back the water rights from irrigation farms in bits and pieces, and more and more people are selling up their permanent water rights and leaving. Selling water has become more lucrative than farming.

According to a statement, the Prime Minister also recently announced the Government’s intention to work with irrigation communities to buy out water entitlements from areas willing to move out of irrigation, facilitated by a price premium reflecting the value of water savings from closure of infrastructure such as supply channels.

The current chairman of the Irrigation Area has made the suggestion to the Australian Minster for Water that for a grand total of $3.5 billion the government could just buy back the whole town: all the water rights at once combined with compensation to allow everyone in town to take up and leave (now there’s no farming community to support them – which is what’s happening anyway). Part publicity stunt, to point out the affect that the continual loss of water and people is having on farming communities, but also a reasonable suggestion that the government may need to make some difficult decisions about what areas should continue irrigation, rather than allowing the de-irrigation to occur in a random patchwork fashion.

Water scientists, including the late Peter Cullen and Wayne Meyer, the professor of Natural Resource Science at the University of Adelaide, have criticised the piecemeal approach to the water buyback.

Professor Meyer said governments should take the hard decisions to take some areas out of irrigation “and concentrate on making the other areas work very, very productively”.

In the late 1990s, the majority of their income for most people in the area came from rice farming. With 100 percent water allocations that might still be the case. But years of drought have led to seven years of reduced water allocations, hovering around 13 percent now. Not enough to grow rice. Enough to struggle along growing bits and pieces, and spending a lot of time hoping for rain, and having bores drilled so you have enough water to keep your livestock alive.

In the newspapers:
Stock and Land
The Land
ABC
The Australian
The Australian (2)

Categories
canada general

hopi rock art

 

 

If you squint your eyes and imagine really hard, you’ll see the pictographs in this photo, from a wall in Grotto Canyon. They’re not behind bars and mesh, so are all nice and polished from thousands of greasy fingers.

Categories
bikes canada general

testing the lht

Despite the miserable looking forecast for this weekend, the weather actually turned out ok (apart from the snow on Saturday night/Sunday morning, which cannot possibly count as ok). So when we decided to go for a ride out to Grotto Canyon followed by a hike up it as far as we could be bothered going, my backpack ended up being full of a nice ballast of warm and waterproof layers while we stripped down to t-shirts.

 

Biking out along the 1A to Grotto Canyon

 

And we ended up getting to the waterfall tucked in the back of Grotto Mountain, many kilometres up the Grotto Canyon drainage – up where it opens up wide. Hiking along a canyon can be difficult. There were no people, no wind, no noise – just silence and stillness. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end and I had to keep fighting the primal urge to go and gain the high ground..