“Was he a big one?” the waitress asked. “Ohhh yes, he was beautiful,” the older man said as he paused slightly as if to reminisce about the image in his head as he went on telling the story. Edgar, works at the Churchill waste management facility and had reported the bear to the Polar Bear […]
When I think about being exposed to different personalities, I always think about online dating. As I slowly rode the tundra buggy around in search of polar bears, I wondered what a bear’s dating profile would look like. “I get hangry when I don’t eat.” “I like to date outdoorsy bears.” “Must be a good […]
Imagine a fish out of water, that’s pretty much what a polar bear is when the sea ice disappears for the summer. It’s a huge, furry marine mammal on land, not where they belong. They aren’t eating, they are roaming around for 4 to 5 months until the ice forms and they can get back […]
One week before heading to the Cariboo Chilcotin Coast in BC Canada, I had this show up in my inbox: “The Chinook Salmon are showing good numbers but it is the Sockeye that the Grizzlies key in on. The Sockeye run is a little later than usual and at this point smaller than some predicted. […]
How would you like to have 182 people in your family? And what if all 182 of them were 4 years old? And had tails? At Snowy Owl Dog Sledding Banff the dogs are family. Yes, yes I know – everyone says that…but trust me when I say Snowy Owl is different than most touristic […]
I feel giddy like a 7-year-old at Christmas. I look out over the barren tundra, a new environment for me, and think about how it makes me feel free and hopeful. The clouds break, and a crack of blue sky appears as if the game of hide and seek is over, and it can finally […]
“It’s called fishing not catching, ” Big Jim said. I figured he had used that line before. But he was right, and it was a good way to set the expectations for my first day of ice fishing. Big Jim, a fishing guide from Banff, was taking me out for the day to his fishing […]
Quick – what’s the first word that pops into your head when you hear Banff Alberta? For 80% of you I’m sure you thought, “skiing”. With 6 months of winter to downhill ski, champagne powder, and 3 (yes 3!) ski hills to choose from, skiing is really the obvious answer. It’s too bad that I […]
“A snowflake falls on the side of a mountain in the rugged Canadian Rockies. But that’s not the end of the story. From that moment on, the snowflake will have a whole new life,” Nadine says with a sparkle in her eyes scanning the audience. The snow is lightly falling around her like feathers from […]
We’ve all seen it during the winter Olympics – the strange and foreign sport of curling. Every 4 years I have the same reaction, “What?! This is an Olympic sport? What next, will they allow shuffleboard into the summer Olympics?” Yet secretly, much like badminton and ping-pong in the summer Olympics, curling intrigued me. When […]
