Poutine is a fantastic Canadian culinary invention. Hot chips (or fries) with gravy and cheese curds.
Bluetine is a slightly more alarming concept, but is also rather tasty.
Sweet potato fries, blue cheese sauce, curds and a demi-glace…. mmmm, curdalicious.
Since the start of December (or some time around then) the snow just hasn’t left the streets. Well, technically it’s left the streets. Unless you count the mushy brown stuff that looks distractingly like creamed butter and brown sugar. But it’s still everywhere else.
These photos were taken at the start of December, just before Banff Avenue re-opened (after months of roadworks). It was a perfect surface for skiing up and down on.
The Christmas lights are coming out all over town now. And suddenly all of those Christmas cards and images and song lyrics make a lot more sense. I’ll have my first white Christmas this year.
And when there’s enough snow on the roads, you can skate (ski skate that is) up the Tunnel Mountain road, and get this view of the Banff Springs Hotel at night, surrounding by snow covered trees.
In lieu of any new ice climbing activity on my latest days off, I’ll just have to reminisce about climbing Cascade Falls the other week.
Just outside of Banff, the 300 metre high Cascade Falls are a popular tourist destination in Summer (there was even a tour bus that had stopped to admire them as we were walking back to the car after finishing climbing for the day – noone on the bus showed much of an inclination to get out though). And in Winter they turn into a fairly classic WI3 ice climb.
We only did the first 150 metres or so, which is fairly low angled and steppy for the most part. It was very odd to see the waterfall still flowing underneath the ice in some spots though (and hear the gurgling of water rushing past after an ice screw was removed).
Because standing in a snow and ice filled gully receiving no sun is a perfect place way to spend a negative fifteen degree day.
Even the glacier worms were finding it cold
Over the last week or so, a nice big flow of warm moist air has been sweeping over here from Hawaii – the particular weather pattern is referred to as the Pineapple Express, and is renowned for bringing large dumps of snow. We got 50 or 60 cm over a few days, and the snow has kept trickling in since. Today was the first day with much blue sky since all the snow arrived to cover the diminishing base…
