jasper

Last weekend was the Labour Day long weekend which was an ideal opportunity to head a bit further afield. I took Friday off too so I could enjoy a leisurely drive up the amazing Icefields Parkway and spend the weekend in Jasper. Last time I was in those parts was back in 1989 but it was an important few days because I met my friend Alex for the first at the youth hostel there. A month later we met again at Freshers Week in Edinburgh and she’s been one of my dearest friends ever since. This time around I was camping (chilly!) but on my first day up there I went back to the hostel to see where it all began. It wasn’t all that familiar but I reckon this was the table where she spotted my jar of Marmite and came over to talk.

My goal was just to take it easy and enjoy the outdoors without too much effort and by and large I succeeded. The weather was variable: some rain, some sun, some snow and I did some nice easy walks that all offered wonderful views. My only disapointment was that I didn’t get to see the fabled view of Maligne Lake in all its glory as the clouds were really low that day.

After visiting the youth hostel I went further up the road to the Jasper Tramway. This is a cable car that whisks you up to 7,000′ and gives you a great view of the surrounding mountains with minimal effort. I liked this shot of the other trippers silhouetted against the clouds that came and went in seconds

I had various grand ideas about getting back to Jasper and renting a mountain bike for more exploring but after lunch I found myself in a cafe getting stuck into a muffin which seemed much more fun. As I sat there thumbing through some free guide to Jasper I read that the trip to Mt Edith Cavell was a scenic drive with some easy walks at the end. Which is exactly how it turned out. A short trail from the car park lead you passed the Angel glacier to the foot of Mt Edith C. and the pond where the meltwaters of the Cavell glacier stood filled with little icebergs.

The real highlight of my easy hiking weekend however was on the way home. I had heard that the Wilcox Pass hike, above the Icefields Centre midway between Jasper and Lake Louise was one of the best in the Rockies AND dead easy. However I was worried the weather might deny me again: I left Jasper in bright sunlight but it clouded over as I got nearer the icefields and at the trailhead the cloud was really low. It seemed thin and I thought it would either burn away soon or I might get above it and be treated to a cloud inversion. In fact the cloud started to clear quite quickly and after a swift half-hour climb through the forest the trail cleared the tree line just as the clouds parted for good. Just as the guidebooks promised the views of the surrounding glaciers were stunning and the effort expended to get there was minimal – a perfect combination.

I hiked with a nice couple from New York who were absolutely in raptures, as was I, at the views around us. I also loved the rocky, grassy landscape of the pass which really reminded me of Yorkshire (with added glaciers)

going home

Not _real_ home actually. I’m moving my blog back to www.ateabutnoe.com. No more redirecting to this wordpress site, so you may need to update your RSS feed if any of you use a feed reader. I’ll be playing around with the look and feel for a while as I haven’t found a theme that I’m totally happy with yet.

cool as folk

Last weekend was the Calgary Folk Music Festival. I went last year on the advice of Ashley and Turner and just as they hinted it was best weekend in town. This year was great as well, even if the weather wasn’t quite as balmy as last time. Sure we had sun, but there was also rain, hail and the closest I’ve ever been to a lightening strike.

Before

After

Much like last year the real joy of the festival was catching bands and sounds I had never heard before. As well as individual concerts people collaborate on the workshop stages. These put 3 or 4 bands together on stage and they play their own songs and maybe jam a bit together. Some are a lot more collaborative than others but the very final one I saw was just stupendous. It teamed a band from Belgium called Jaune Toujours who I’m calling ‘gypsy-punk’ (all accordians and clarinets, trumpets etc) with a traditional Hungarian group called Duvo (fiddlers, bass player and a dude hammering away on the dulcimer). The final part of the musical melange was the extraordinary hip-hop stylings of Socalled: straight outta Montreal mashing up rap, klezmer and traditional jewish rhythms (look for him on the iTunes iMix Hip to be Heeb)

I turned up just after the show got under way but things were already in full swing. The Calgary folk festival is very much a sitting down kind of a festival but here most folks were on their feet and jumping around madly. It was hard to know whose song was playing. The Belgians would start a rhythm, the Hungarian fiddlers would pick it up and then Socalled would come in rapping over the top! It was absolutely amazing and reached a peak at the final number. Socalled introduced a song of his called “These are the good old days” and soon everybody was dancing and singing along. When the time was up (they were hard on the timings here) he waved to the crowd and walked off. However the singer/accordianist from Jaune Toujours didn’t want to stop. He took over the singing and the fiddlers kept fiddling, the crowd kept dancing and after a minute or so Socalled came back on stage. Picking up the clock off the floor that showed when they had to get off he gave an embarrassed shrug and the poor stage manager reluctantly indicated they could have 3 minutes more and so the party continued. It was one of those moments that I really didn’t want to stop.

Other highlights included rock and rollers, Los Straightjackets in their suits and Mexican wrestling masks

I also loved the old timey sounds of the Carolina Chocolate Drops (love any band with a bloke blowing into a jug). Most of their music was traditional Appalachian material but they also did a wicked cover of Hit ‘em Up Style by Blu Cantrell!

Probably the best thing I saw however was a guitarist from Saskatchewan called Joel Fafard. He played acoustic guitar unaccompanied but it sounded like there were 2 or 3 folks playing with him. That was some fancy picking!

I have to say I was so inspired that I got home on Saturday night and went straight onto eBay. I’d tried to learn the guitar as a teenager with very little success. Trouble was I found it absolute agony to make the chords so I gave up wondering how anyone did it. A few years later I realised that I cannot turn my left arm palm upwards which explained the agony. I suppose I could have learned to play left handed but the spirit never moved me. However in the last couple of years as I’ve got more into folk and country I’ve dreamed of learning the pedal style or least the lap guitar. And now I’m going to! When I got back from the folk fest and onto eBay I found a dude in Maryland selling a lap steel guitar plus instructional booklet! I’m now eagerly awaiting it’s delivery.

So if anyone at home plays the fiddle, the spoons or knows how to blow into a jug, get your people onto my people.

small town alberta

Would you drive an hour and half to see this?

Not just this mind, there’s plenty of others (and there’s more on my flickr site)

All part of the fun of the fair at the “World Famous Torrington Gopher Hole Museum”. It’s world famous so I’m assuming you’ve all heard of it. Apparently if you are a member of PETA then you’ve definitely heard about it and, surprise surprise, you don’t like it. Turns out it was their outrage that made the museum world famous. It seems that Torrington, Alberta, was looking for a tourist attraction and somehow or other the gopher museum idea came up. Wouldn’t you have loved to be a fly on the wall at that council meeting? Anyway they went with it and now Torrington has gone big on gophers in as many ways as possible.

Seems to work as it lured me and my friend Meg from work out there. Torrington however wasn’t our only goal. It turns out that small town Alberta has many delights in those parts. We were only 1 hour away from the Big Valley Creation Science Museum so how could miss out on that?

The museum itself looks like a modest house on the main street, admittedly one with a dinosaur sculpture on the wall and dinosaur footprints in the garden. The interior has clearly seen quite a lot of investment and is certainly well thought-out. You could even say it seemed quite intelligently designed (boom boom!). Things seemed somewhat less convincing when you stopped to read what it said however. Quite a lot of effort had gone in to building a model ark and explaining the “eye-witness” accounts of its dimensions. They also provided useful answers to some of those awkward logistical questions that may have been causing you to doubt the veracity of the ark and flood story. Did Noah take dinosaurs on board? Obviously yes – he took two of everything. But this is using the old noggin… he took baby dinosaurs! A lot more convenient than a full size diplodocus it turns out. I shall now think of them not so much as juveniles but as handy travel-sized sauropods. You were probably also concerned that the lions on board would have eaten the sheep. Again the answer is baby lions, baby sheep. Baby lions not nearly as fierce it turns out. Plus nobody was really eating anything as when animals get stressed they hibernate thus decreasing the need for provisions or for Shem, Ham and Japheth to be constantly mucking out the velociraptors.

If that wasn’t enough they produced a reproduction of an illuminated scroll from Lambeth Palace showing Henry III’s direct patrilineal descent from Adam and Eve. Luckily it didn’t dwell on the awkward questions of the incestuous relations of Seth and his other brothers and sisters. I’m sure things were different in them days.

Attention was given to the age of the earth and the nonsense about millions and billions of years. If you can turn a teddy bear into calcium carbonate in a matter of years by leaving it in a appropriate stream then whose to say you can’t knock out some granite or a nice mica-schist given a century or two. Well the world’s geologists I would think but that’s by the by. Another area they dealt with was depictions of dinosaurs in prehistoric and medieval art. Turns out there’s a perfect stegasaurus carving in a Cambodian temple while our very own Carlisle Cathedral seems to have a depiction of two brontosaurii knecking. The attitude being “If you draw it, you saw it”. I look forward to a unicorn skeleton turning up.

Anyway I didn’t get involved in any heated debates, the man on the door was very friendly, he left us alone and he seemed at peace with himself and that’s what it’s all about eh?

Big Valley had some other interesting, if more conventional, sights as well. They have preserved their grain elevator as a silent landmark on the prairie skyline and that was interesting to see as well as some of the railway memorabilia they had on display.

Walking back to the car we met Ralph the Wonder Camper. Ralph had driven up from California on his Harley. He had a trailer strapped to the back from which he could deploy the most extraordinarily sophisticated camping set-up. Sleeping for 6, a separate shower block, hot water on tap, a larder, dining table, DVD player, Coleman stove, oven and even air conditioning for those 100 degree days in the desert. It was most impressive.

float

The Bow river runs through Calgary and on a summer’s weekend chances are there’ll be loads of rafts and inflatable dinghys enjoying a leisurely float from up by Bowness down to the Zoo. Don’t go beyond the Zoo – there’s a weir and a few people have gone over it but not many have survived. I and some of my TW friends managed to get out before the weir and good fun it was. Good fun, good weather and almost no physical exertion. Thems the good times.

We had paddles but pretty much only used them to get out into the current. From then on down you just go with the flow. If you are in Calgary in the summertime then this is definitely highly recommended.

One less than 5, one more than 3

Sesame Street is back!

But where is the Count?

outward bound

This weekend was my first ever proper backpacking trip. I’m a little bit sunburned but not nearly as achey as I was last night after all that walking. Thank God for Vitamin I(buprofen). It was lots of fun if very exhausting and we were super lucky with the weather. The folks we met on the trail hiking out had had snow a couple of days earlier but we enjoyed sun all the way through and sensational views like this..

I went with the Calgary Outdoor Club and our goal was the Egypt Lake shelter in Banff National Park. Basically we had to take everything we needed for camping except a tent. Not being used to walking with a big pack I did find it pretty hard work. The nice views helped but what I really loved was the amazing smell of pine in the air as we climbed through the forest to Healy Pass. It reminded me of my first ever trip to the Rockies in 1989. I went on a walk through the woods near Banff and was just amazed how fragrant the forest was. It was like someone had just cleaned the path with Flash, organic Flash even. Breathe it in… How’s the serenity?

thunderstruck!

I don’t get a great view of the Stampede fireworks from my flat because an appartment building thoughtlessly blocks the view. However tonight I got a superb view of a huge electrical storm over town. I uploaded some video and some sounds to a website called jumpcut.com and here is the result (utterly unembedable in this blog – chizz chizz)

my new favourite sport

The Calgary Stampede is back and this time I’m prepared. I gots myself a proper cowboy shirt, a big ol’ belt buckle and of course the boots that Ashley so kindly gave me. But I wasn’t sure I would get a chance to head down to the grounds apart from today so I popped along to catch some of the team penning that I had enjoyed so much last year.

Team penning is fantastic entertainment. This little vid shot on my phone doesn’t do it justice but I’m really hooked. It’s a bit like One Man and his Dog. Only with 3 people. On horses. With cows. The idea is you have to separate 3 numbered cows from the heard of 30 and drive them back to the pen at the other end of the building. You’re only allowed one cow with another number to pass the half-way line or else you’re done. There’s a time limit of 61 seconds but we were privileged to witness a Stampede record of 16 seconds! This video isn’t it.

These folks are genuine cowboys (and girls). Their riding skills are just amazing and I hope this video gives a bit of a taste.

sled island

It may not quite be Glastonbury but Sled Island, Calgary’s own indie-music festival, culminated last weekend with some outdoor concerts a mere 6 blocks from my house. I like it when rock is convenient like that. But like Glastonbury, Sled Island is about more than the music. It’s only the second year of the festival but the organisers are thinking I big and I salute them for it. Festival director Zak Pashak made quite a stirring call to arms in his notes in the festival guide. He said Sled Island was all about civic pride:

Calgarians are searching. The city is gradually learning that pretending to be what you think another city is, is an empty path. Visit one of our various new $10-a-beer-resto-lounges to get a first hand experience of emptiness. I don’t think we really want pathetic interpretations of New York, what we want is that thing that New Yorkers have – we want real pride in where we live.

Go Zak! But dude is just warming up…

Alberta could be so many things. We could be an unrivaled center of education. We could have free, high quality education for every citizen of this province. Money is there by the bucket load – but where is it going? How different would Calgary look if we focused on educating ourselves and attracting bright minds to our city? Would the epicenter of our greatest civic celebration still consist of drunk millionaires renting cocaine dusted barbie dolls at an outhouse smelling parking lot behind a downtown theme-bar? Is that really how we want to represent ourselves to the world? Is that at all real?

Nice work. I heart Zak Pashak!

Anyway there was music too and my friends Andree, Jason, Pat and Victoria. Here’s my heros, zeroes and meh from the festival.

Heroes - Elliot Brood. I like a band in a shirt and tie. They played just what the programme said they would play: “audacious old-timey frontier musical stylings”

Zeroes - Yo La Tengo. Maybe I should have gone with Martin to their indoor gig. Because out in the field they seemed all over the place. One minute they were doing sub-Radiohead sonic noodling which frankly I can’t be bothered with even when Radiohead do it. Then they sat down and knocked out a few Ben Folds numbers on the piano. That was a bit better. Then back to the guitars for a Jesus Built My Hotrod-era Ministry tribute. Or that’s what it all seemed like to me.

Heroes - Tegan and Sarah. Local girls made good. Great songs and great singing. And when Tegan borrowed some sunglasses from a member of the audience I got a great idea that’s going to make me rich. An all-girl Ramones tribute band called the Shemones. Rock chicks, shades, guitars, high-energy rock and roll. You want that in your life – come on!

Superheroes - Chixdiggit. Another local band but apparently they’ve been going nearly 20 years so they never made really good it seems. They were fantastic though and my highlight of the festival. You knew they were going to be good when they walked on stage guitars slung around their knees. Lead singer then adjusted his mike stand, lowering it by about a foot, spread his legs wide apart in a classic Lemmy pose, announced he’d had a shawarma and might be sick and then proceeded to rock. They knew the golden rule that any song over 3 minutes long is getting into noodly prog-rock territory so kept things commendably brief. Their stage banter was unparalleled as well. I particularly enjoyed the good-natured baiting of the Broken Social Scene fans clustered at the front of the neighbouring stage who wouldn’t walk 50 feet to their right to see them. In the words of the band – let’s hear it for Chixdiggit.

Meh - Broken Social Scene. Maybe it was following Chixdiggit but I couldn’t get into their pompous (again sub-Radiohead) sonic noodling for a while. But the second half of their set tightened up when the started to play some actual songs with a bit more oomph. Score draw.

Hero- Jonathan Richman. I’d last seen Jonathan Richman in Edinburgh in the early 90s. I remember it as a very bohemian gig where the support act was some dude doing poetry with a guy on the cello accompanying him. Or maybe he was accompanying himself at the time. Anyway if you can remember a Jonathan Richman gig you weren’t really there. I do remember that JR had a pretty crazy look in his eye and came across as fun but odd. I’m glad to say that 15 years later it’s all still there! It was just him on guitar (and occasional shaky maraca things) plus a drummer. It was fun and odd in equal measure. He writes great songs and sings with wonderful style and I would certainly hope to see him again in less than 15 years time.

Somewhere on the continuum between zero and meh – Mogwai. Mogwai seriously didn’t do it for me but I think it might be my fault. As the headline act on the last day of the festival I encouraged my friends to leave our comfy spot on the grassy bank overlooking the stage and get down to the front and into the crowd. Big mistake…. huge! I reckon if we’d stayed back there then their neo-shoegazing would have been a perfect ambience for sunset on a hot summers evening. But not knowing what to expect I thought we should be in the thick of it. I’m just old fashioned, I know, but when a band (or anyone) is on stage with an audience in front of them I expect to them to do something to capture and hold our attention. Here we are now, if you will, entertain us! But Mogwai have to have the least stage presence of any band I have ever seen. At one point all four guitarists were at the back of the stage, backs to the audience facing the drummer or amp stands. Lads – don’t forget the funzone! I couldn’t take it to be honest and hollered – “Yoo hoo! We’re over here!” Didn’t work and after some more of the same I got bored and went home. I later came to see it was probably my fault for wanting them to be something they are not. I still think they aren’t headline material though. I wanted more Chixdiggit!