Southern Alberta in 2.5 Days

Last weekend, I let my tendency to overload myself with obligations get a little out of hand. However, it resulted in a pretty magnificent solo tour of Southern Alberta, and though I’m not sure this is the best way to see this province, it certainly drives in the stark contrasts of beauty within short reach of each other.

            I had just finished a week of work in Edmonton. Yes, I know that’s not Southern Alberta, but it’s framework. After a weekend at home in Strathmore, and a Canada Day performance with my band, I rolled down the hill to Drumheller, to a summer school I was starting work at for my ninth consecutive summer. Drumheller is a city that gets a bad rap sometimes. People see the touristy schlock as overwhelming, they find the population too transient, they hate how in the summer it’s five degrees hotter and in winter five degrees colder than the rest of the area on any given day. However, for almost a decade I’ve spent the first three weeks of every summer living there, and there isn’t a city in Canada that can’t show you its best side in that particular time frame, so you’ll excuse me if I have a soft spot for dinosaur-ville.

           

Thursday evening: Drumheller

            My students are part of the cast in the Canadian Badlands Passion Play, so I spent the evening watching rehearsals. The natural amphitheatre is spectacle enough, surrounded by the hoodoos of the Badlands, by the Neapolitan of those bentonite hills. It’s a well-known fact that on the site it’s five to ten degrees hotter than in town, making it sometimes fifteen degrees hotter than home, so I take my Nordic flesh and search for shade—there were no Vikings in first century Judea.

            A summer storm was drawn out by the heat, and for an hour we were pummeled by hail and then soaked by a deluge. Then the sky did what prairie summer skies do in the summer after a storm, and rehearsal resumed. During the last hour, a rainbow formed, complete from end to end. Then, a second rainbow formed above it, complete as well, and from the crowds of mock-Hebrews below came a chorus of YouTube-inspired praise for this spectacle.

The Passion Play post-storm

Friday: The Foothills and Crowsnest Pass

            I tore out of the valley just after my morning classes had finished, taking full advantage of a rare half-day at work. I stopped in Strathmore to make sure my marriage was still in good shape, transitioned my overnight bag, and then ripped out to the Pass.

            Alberta’s Highway 2, the QE2, is one of the worst driving experiences in Canada. I’m no sissy behind the wheel—I can handle heavy traffic and triple lanes. But’s it’s little better than an American freeway, a sad stretch of bumper-to-bumper, the view choked off by never-ending roadside capitalism, or its unappealing bush country if you go north of Panoka. The QE2 exists so that you may discover secondary highways.

            I plunged into the Foothills at Nanton, taking the 533 and 22 route to Blairmore and Coleman.

The Foothills. A lot of places claim to be God’s Country, but when mountains meet prairie, when the land appears to stretch and say it was meant to be occupied by greater things than us, and then you see the best of what this land has to offer. I don’t say this because I want to live there. I’ve no desire to ranch, and I got my fill of hurricane blow driers during the first twenty years of my life in Southwest Saskatchewan. But it’s one of the most heart-aching of landscapes, and despite being on the clock, I found myself stopping frequently to get out and hear the wind speak.

            I arrived in Coleman—just west of Blairmore—for a spaghetti supper and information session. I was a member of one of two teams from Strathmore that were running the Sinister 7 relay the next morning. After we had been properly fed and given some placebo information on what to do if you’re attacked by a bear (just saying “Kiss your ass goodbye” sounds defeatist), Kevin, Mike and the crew took me to the ski lodge we had rented for our teams. Most of them were making a weekend of it, but I only got the one night, so I took a few minutes to watch the sun set on the Pass before heading in for the night.

Sundown in the Pass

Saturday: Sinister 7 to Red Deer

            When you stay in the Pass in July, there’s the temptation to say you would like to move there. It’s inconceivably gorgeous, even for us prairie folk who are born with unshakable suspicion of vertical life. However, before you make any rash real estate decisions, I would suggest—just as with Drumheller and the Foothills—that you see how bearable it is in the winter first. Or, simply spend a night there camping with 1400 other runners, being blasted awake through the night by the horns of passing trains. Yeah, less than a bright side.

            Up just after 5 am, thanks in no small part to the good people of CP, I got ready to race. The Sinister 7 is a 148 km relay across the Pass over two days. I was running Leg 2, a 16km jaunt that would see me done before lunch. Some of the poor bastards on my team would be running in snow after midnight.

            We went down into Blairmore to cheer on our first two runners at the 7 am gun. Jason and Leanne were in one of those rare spots in the sport of running where you get a large crowd to cheer you on. There would be no such fanfare when Jason handed our team’s timing chip off to me, lucky bugger.

            Once we’d seen them off, us Leg 2 folks were piled onto school buses and shuttled up the mountain east of Frank’s Slide. We started at the base of Hasting’s Ridge, waiting on Jason. A few other runners came through before him: the hard-core Leg 1 folks, and even a few of the soloists. Yes, these were the masochistic sunsabitches running the entire 148 km in 25 hours on their own. Holy sweet fuck.

            When I got the chip, it was pretty much straight up for the first hour. Mountain trails up and across the world’s best range, with a view of Crowsnest Mountain and the Seven Sisters. Spectacular, though I admit I didn’t get much chance to admire it because I was too busy watching to see that I didn’t trip over a rock or tree root or cougar or bear—which they’d given us a 50/50 chance of coming upon. Holy sweet fuck.

            It was gorgeous, what I saw, and my eight months of running on a treadmill with full incline paid off, because I was able to run up all but the most stupid sheer climb at the 10k mark, which I had to resort to walking/scrambling. The down slopes were less than inspiring, because you can’t make much time when you’re hammering your feet to pulp on great chunks of broken national symbol, or when you’re mud-skiing slopes, your hands reaching out to grab random trees for balance and speed control. Passed through rocks, fire kill, and dense vegetation.

            There was a lot of good humour and camaraderie on these trails, despite the difficulty the course and the drive of most racers. Despite the fact that most of us were competitive half, full, and ultra-marathoners, after that first savage peak, we stopped worrying about our times and just worried about our feet.

            16.78k, 900+ up, 1100 down later, I was back in Blairmore and passed off to Rob, who was on duty for the even more abusive Leg 3. A quick visit with my friends, some pats on the back and high fives, and I wished them luck as I left for my car. Grabbed a sub and I was four-wheel bound again.

            Perhaps it was the post-race euphoria, but that lunch hour made the Foothills even more spectacular than the previous evening. Again, I stopped many times to take in the view—and to make sure my legs didn’t stiffen up.

On the way out of the Foothills

            I had learned that the QE2 north of Nanton was in full summertime construction mode, so I decided to veer off onto the 547, taking the 24 and 817 route home. From Foothills to purest, rolling Prairie. Canadian Prairie might not make your heart catch in your throat like the Rockies at sunset, but it will always be home. After the elevation run that morning, it was just nice to be looking at something flat.

            I stopped in Strathmore to shower and to shift my overnight bag from race to wedding mode, then out on the #9 and eventually to the goddam QE2 into Red Deer. Yes, I could’ve taken back roads the whole way, but sometimes 130 km per is in order. I made it to Red Deer in time for supper, and to dance the night away with my wife and kids. Still had enough in the tank for waterslides in the morning.

            I don’t recommend seeing hoodoos, foothills, mountains, and prairie in a forty-eight hour period, but I do recommend seeing them all at some time, and close enough together to appreciate the contrast. The beauty of my adoptive province hit me like an assault last weekend, and the easy transition of the topography was countered only by that dramatic disparity. God’s Country? Dunno, but certainly several slices of His favorite counties.