MeAnd’Er ing out of Alberta

 

We’re making our way East as our friends in Hay River are making their way West to escape the forest fire.  Our hearts and prayers are with them.

Day 6: 

We gave ourselves more time in Lethbridge because there is so much to see in this part of Alberta.  Let me start off with Analog Bookstore in Downtown - my favourite bookstore so far.  It’s owned by Penny and Scott and they have done an outstanding job making it interactive - a Postcard table with Analog postcards to hand write and mail to your friends and family, the local post office got involved and found them some really cool stamps.  I mailed a card to Amy at Totally Book-ish in Mission.  They also have an old typewriter set up for you to leave a note on what we love about independent bookstores.  And - the bookstore cat looked just like our family cat Roxanne, and there’s a whole serendipity story around that that I’ll tell you when we get home.  

https://www.analogbooks.net/

The streets here are so wide - 4 lanes plus angle parking on both sides!  Wow, if we did that in Mission wouldn’t have any shops!

There’s a really big park in the centre of town that was set aside for the city by the Galt Company Alberta Railway and Irrigation Company, commemorating the Galt family who were an intricate part instrumental in developing Lethbridge through the coal resources found nearby.  And not unlike many city parks, is home to a number of people who are experiencing homelessness.  It’s huge, beautiful, and has a large Rotary presence.  Unfortunately, the Southern Alberta Art Gallery was closed.  We had a wonderful lunch at a little place called the Streatside Diner and the server gave us a business card to add to our collection of independent bookstore bookmarks!  How sweet is that.

We spent the afternoon at the Nikki Yuko (from Nihon meaning Japan and ka from Kanada or Canada, and Yuko, which translates as friendship) Japanese Gardens and it tells an amazing story of people who migrated to Canada from Japan for economic and employment opportunities.  It is a beautiful, peaceful sanctuary nestled on 4 acres.  If you want to read more about it, here is the link, and the Bio section is particularly good.  https://nikkayuko.com/

And, as serendipity seems to be in full force on this journey, we happened to be there the day the Minho Dancers performed traditional dances. 

We’re struggling with finding places to eat that aren’t “restaurant” food, but we’ll get it figured out.  I’m craving a Buddha Bowl!

Day 7: 

Today we tested our limit in what we could do in a day, and a test it was!

3 destinations in 1 day -

*  McBride Wind Farm

* Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump

* Waterton Lakes Park

with a stop in Fort MacLeod to charge the car and poke around a bit.  Cute little town in kind of a time warp, but it does have a charging station so I have to give it that.  An outpost of the North West Mounted Police, but most importantly - the birth place of Joni Mitchell 💞. Now if that doesn’t give a town claim to fame I don’t know what does!  

So let’s start with Wind Farms - there are turbines all over the place but what we were looking for was an interpretive centre or someplace that could tell us what is going on, how they work?  where the energy is going?  etc.  We’ll, let me tell you - Siri couldn’t make up her mind if we should go to McGrath Wind Farm in Carston  County or McBride Wind Farm in Fort MacLeod, so she took us through miles of unpaved backroads through farms and cattle pastures.  At one point we were very near to crossing the border into Montana, and heading so far east along the border that it felt we would end up in Saskatchewan. 

I felt a bit like Don Quixote chasing windmills, and Siri was Sancho.

Here’s what we found: The McBride wind farm has 114 turbines and generates enough energy to power more than 32,500 homes for one year.  The production of energy generated by wind power at the McBride facility reduces annual emissions by 235,000 tones of CO2.  Switching to electricity generated by wind power instead of electricity generated by wind power instead of electricity generated by wind power instead of electricity derived from burning fossil fuels for you annual electricity needs would be equal to not driving your car 30,000km.

That’s Roger standing at the base of the tower!

Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump

Really, that is what it is called.  It is 22km from Fort MacLeod and the Interpretive Centre is built into the side of the mountain, so respectful and unassuming. 

Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump was inscribed on the World Heritage Sites list in 1982, joining places of “outstanding universal value” such as the Pyramids, the Great Wall, Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon, Stonehenge and nearly 1,000 more. 

The story is amazing of the practice of the Blackfoot Indians in the Great Plains staging animal behaviours to have the buffalo (bison) gather into drive lanes and finally stampede over the cliffs.  The hunters disguised themselves as wolves to appear as a threat, which made the buffalo tighten the herd to protect the young, then others disguised as lost calves to bring the herd to follow in one specific direction lining them up into the drive lane lined with branches.  Then others disguised as buffalo running to encourage the stampede, which brought the buffalo over the jump, and certain death!

Every part of the animal was used and prepared for provisions for travel and over the winter.  The conditions had to be just right so several sites were used across the Plains.

Later the buffalo were pretty much wiped out by hunting crews killing as many as 100/day to provide hides for coats for the Canadian and American armies and the NWMP, taking only the hides and leaving the carcasses to rot.  Farming also contributed to the demise of the buffalo as land was cleared of native plants to make room for crops, much like we clear forests in other parts.

The Bison are now a protected species with herds down from 10’s of thousands to a few hundred.

Waterton Lake National Park

Last stop this blog, I promise!

This place was a must see according to many - especially a young man in a gallery in Canmore who, with full body language described the flat prairie into the rolling hills into the mountains.  And he was right - the Rockies are Right There!

The Waterton Park Front is a conservation project with local ranchers and the Nature Conservacy of Canada and the W. Garfield Weston Foundation to save approximately 30,000 acres and is maintained by local ranchers for more than a century and is the largest private land conservation initiative in Canadian history.  Pretty impressive.  

The mountains in the background are the Rockies in Montana’s Glacier National Park.

The village is resort town-ish but nice - not sure if the “See you next year” signs in shop windows mean “See you next Summer” or “See you next Winter”, the message wasn’t very clear.  But Pat’s gas station was doing a booming business in the bike rental department!  

We stopped for dinner at the Lakeside Chop House where I found my illusive Buddha Bowl - which Roger had because I opted for the crab cakes!

Other points along the way: 

 * Pincher Creek - Ian Tyson lived there

 * Spring Point Colony - another Hutterite colony

 * I have a cold!

A very long day chasing down windmills, buffalo and Rockies, we didn’t get back to our room in Lethbridge until 8PM.