Animals!

Those who have been following me on Facebook recently have been bombarded by pictures of moose. Last week there were two moose that had invaded my backyard and the hill across the street from my house. As a huge city kid, seeing moose is a huge deal. In fact it is such a huge deal that I forgot to remember that moose are more dangerous than cars, and they are extremely aggressive. No matter, I was really lucky that day.

The calf that invaded my backyard. I had no idea it was a calf because it was so big.

The cow and calf. At this point I realized the calf was a calf because the cow was huge. It looks like she's suffering from some sort of mange though. It must have been a tough winter.

The Cow.

The "gifts" the moose left on my back steps when I got home.

Later this morning I went out to clean the backyard when I spotted a group of Mule Deer. Mule Deer are everywhere in Peace River, and can be identified by their large, mule-like ears, and the black spot on their tails. They were just chilling across the road and I had no choice but to snap some photos. I tried to catch a picture of the baby fawn, but alas her camouflage in the trees fooled my camera.

Can you spot the fawn? I barely can.

Later she appeared with Mom

 And lastly, the neighbour's cat looked cool.

A trip to Fox Lake

I've spent the past three months of the 2014 on the Northern Circuit. On this circuit, we have court in High Level, Fort Vermillion and Assumption. The Fort Vermillion courthouse covers all criminal charges that come out of the surrounding area, which includes the town of Fort Vermillion, oldest settlement in Alberta, the local Mennonite Community south of Fort Vermillion, La Crete, as well as the reserves of the Little Red River Nation, namely, John D'or Prairie, Fox Lake and Garden River.

This past month, I went with a Probation Officer, Jason, to see Fox Lake, one of the most isolated communities in the area. Fox Lake is a community that has no roads in or out. In order to drive to Fox Lake, you can cross via an ice road in the winter, or by the ferry barge in the summer. In the shoulder seasons when there is not enough ice to build a road or too much ice for the ferry to cross, the only way in and out of the community is by plane. As such, Fox Lake is one of those rare communities in northern Alberta that can be as isolated as communities in the territories. Sometimes, you just have to wait it out, as air travel is extremely expensive for the everyday person, it being upwards of $800 for a round trip.



My coworkers and people have always told me about the conditions of Fox Lake. They tell me it's a difficult place to live, and some of the files that come out there are a bit hard to read about. Recently Fox Lake was in the news for quite a sad case. You can read the article here.

I went to visit Fox Lake to quite candidly see what it looks like. I'm cognizant that what I saw over a couple of hours on a warm winter day cannot necessarily be an example of daily life. All I can write about is what I observed that day.

To get to Fox Lake by the road, you head west from High Level on Highway 58 and keep going from paved road to gravel road. Once you hit the gravel road, it's about 100 odd kilometres until you reach the turn off for John D'or Prairie. Now I learned today that you can either continue on the road for another 60 odd km and then turn off  and head south until you hit the Peace River and the ice road, or you can drive through John D'or Prairie and take a road that follows the Peace River until you reach the ice road. We took the latter path this morning. The road is all gravel covered in snow. I was told by Jason that in the Spring when the road is all muddy from the melting ice, your car will get stuck and many cars have been lost and abandoned on that road. Sure enough we counted over 5 trucks and cars just rusting away on the side of the road. Most of them had been there for a year, with all their windows smashed out, or the car was flipped over.

Once you get to the ice road and cross it you're in Fox Lake.

We took the road into the community, drove past the airport, I took a wrong turn and almost drove into a herd of wild horses. They're wild in the sense that they don't belong to anyone; it's likely, that people feed them and they were abandoned many years ago.

That white horse greeted me with fresh manure.

I was shadowing Jason today, whose job it was to meet with new clients who were given probation, and also set up meetings with clients who needed to be interviewed for various other reports. We set up shop in the local police detachment, which has a mighty 3 police officers for a community of 2,500, an antiquated giant key to lock cells and a photo of HMTQ (Her Majesty the Queen). After all the meetings were done Jason drove me around town and did a house visit.

I noticed that a lot of the housing in the area are trailers. Windows are often boarded up if they can't be replaced and to keep the heat in as it gets really cold. Some of the trailers are in better shape than others, and some people live in duplexes or small houses. There's a map in the police detachment that shows that family groups tend to stay in the same place. Without road signage, I figure you guess the area someone lives by their last name, and work out from there.

One of the places that I found was interesting was the local grocery store, the Northern Store. Jason told me he believes it's a subsidiary of the Hudson's Bay Company, and it's basically like a mini Walmart. I tried to snap some photos of ludicrous grocery prices, if there were any, and all I found was milk. It's nowhere near the prices my friends in the Territories have showed me. With Spring coming and the ice road still up, they're able to still get goods in by truck. Apparently when the road is closed and the community is shut in, the prices will rise. There are also a couple of private stores in town that store other goods.

Some other buildings I saw around the town were the new school and the Nursing Station. They built a new school in the community because of the growing population of the reserve. Fox Lake is growing rapidly, with many young people in the community stressing the current school size. The Nursing Station, from the best of what I could gather, is like a mini hospital. For anything major, patients would be flown out or driven out to the hospital in Fort Vermillion, or for the most serious matters, to Edmonton.

The old school

The new school

The Nursing Station

Leaving Fox Lake my impression was that it was much better than what I thought it would be. I feel that shows just how ignorant I am about the First Nations Communities up here. I'm glad I went.

A cool experience I recently had.

Well it's been very long since I've last uploaded this blog. It is long overdue. I have had some great experiences over the Summer that I have periodically linked on Facebook, but I've decided to use this blog to talk about a recent experience I had.

One of the local defence lawyers, Ivan Ladouceur,  has a herd of buffalo and lives outside of High Prairie. Ivan is Metis, mostly Dene and Cree. The Dene nation and the Woodland Cree are two of the larger First Nations that live in our area. He is originally from the Fort Chipewan area, which is north of Fort MacMurray in northeastern Alberta, but he works out of the High Prairie area. He is planning on moving back up north, so he invited us to his home to cull some buffalo and attend a sweat ceremony.

Now I didn't and probably don't know much about going for a sweat, but it is and probably will be one of the most unique and memorable experiences I'll have while living in northern Alberta.

So as to not offend anyone, I'll skip details about the buffalo cull, but we culled two buffalo in the morning and then started preparing for the sweat ceremony in the afternoon.

Ivan built the sweat lodge itself, which you can see here:

I didn't take any photos inside, but what is inside is a smaller dome like structure that is made of willow branches and covered with sacks and skins. Inside the dome is a pit where you place hot stones. The stones we used were volcanic rock from B.C. that he keeps outside.

Before the ceremony, we had to start a fire to heat the stones. We lit a huge fire and let it burn for a couple of hours to heat the stones until they were glowing. Ivan then burnt some sweetgrass and made a prayer for the buffalo and for the sweat and then we smudged ourselves with the sweetgrass. Smudging, as far as I can understand is like breathing in the smoke and wafting it towards you. After we smudged ourselves, we entered the sweatlodge.

Men sat on the right and women sat on the left of the entrance. The men only wore shorts and the women wore what looked like nightgowns. After entering the sweatlodge, we all sat down, the leader, Ivan, said a few prayers and we passed around a tobacco pipe. After we had finished smoking the pipe, we brought in the stones. It was really interesting. The stones would be removed from the fire outside with a pitchfork, dusted off and then transferred into the lodge. Once in the lodge, Ivan would use a pair of deer antlers to grab the stones and place them into the pit inside the sweatlodge. After we gathered a sufficient amount of stones, we would close the entrance to the sweatlodge and it would be pitch black except for the glow coming off the stones. Ivan would sprinkle tobacco and some sort of root over the stones, say some prayers and the share some words. Everyone in the lodge would share some words if they wanted to. After each person shared some words, there would be singing and prayers. Throughout the whole time water would be sprinkled onto the stones. It got hot, really really hot.

We would occasionally have breaks to get some air before going back in and adding more stones. In total we used 14 stones, and it felt like we had sweated for a couple of hours. I was drenched and dehydrated by the end of it, but I also felt like I had really sweat out some toxins. My limited understanding is that the sweats are used to sweat out and discuss what's going on in your life. It is both a time for pain and healing, both physically and psychologically.

After the sweat ended, the men would leave first, followed by the women and stand in a line. Each person that left after the first would hug the other and thank them.

My knowledge of First Nations practices, customs, and culture is so limited. I am really thankful that I got to have this great experience.

An eventful May of outdoor activities and the return to Vancouver

So I haven't updated in awhile so I promise that this post will have more substance. And when I mean substance, I mean photos, because frankly, words are less colourful. Except for some words, like grandiloquent. That is a colourful word.

Anyway ...winter has finally left Alberta for the most part and we got to enjoy spring in Peace River. Everything is green: the hills, the trees, the grass. It looked amazing out here ... until the caterpillars came out and ate all the trees.

 As I have learned, the evil tent caterpillar infests and eats all the trees in the area, so all the beautiful green trees become brown and bare. I want to spare you the visual horror, so just trust me in knowing that the beautiful green hills seen below are no longer beautiful and green.

This past month I also had the opportunity to go to Jasper for the first time as part of the Crown Retreat. I have never been to Jasper before, in recent memory, and I drove down to see the beautiful wildlife and take in some hiking. I recently started training for a Triathlon in September so Jasper was the perfect playground to run on some trails, bike on some roads and burn off the 5 beers and one steak I had planned to consume every night. Sadly, most nights, it was just the one beer, and no steak. 

Some of my favourite moments include hiking down Maligne Canyon, and hiking up Whistler's Mountain, not to be confused with Whistler Mountain in BC. Whistler's Mountain is a 7km hike with an altitude change of around 1000m with a trail taking you from the base to the top and a tram to take you down (and up I suppose). The trail was good for the first half, but I didn't manage to quite escape winter yet, which was evident when the hiking trail I followed for half the ascent disappeared under metres of snow and I was forced to bushwhack and scale a ridge for 2 hours. Also fun fact: Stop hiking alone! It doesn't help you if you get hurt or lost and you tend to go crazy talking to yourself on a deserted mountain trail.

 

 

The view up top was spectacular.

Another thing about Jasper is the abundance of wildlife. I saw some caribou, elk and deer.

The elk here are extremely aggressive and they reminded me of the time when I came here, about 20 years ago with my parents. I was sleeping in the car when I woke up, saw an elk, promptly walked up to it, and pet it. I was then knocked unconscious as it kicked me in the back of my head. I guess that explains my animosity towards the elk, and their animosity towards me. They ... remember. 

After leaving Jasper I travelled down to Calgary for the Victoria Day Weekend. I passed through the Icefields Parkway stopping at Athabasca Falls and just before the Icefields before making it down to visit my girlfriend, Joyce.

 

 

Meanwhile, in Peace River, apparently a rainstorm had struck the town and washed out the highway on Judah Hill, one of the smaller highways to get out of town. That poor highway, I wonder if they'll ever fix it? What's really unfortunate is that the residents who live on the hill have their morning drive extended by 40 minutes, which is incredibly inconvenient.

By the end of the week, I travelled to Vancouver to attend a friend's wedding. It was Joyce's first time there, and as well as eating the requisite sushi that the town had to offer, we biked the Seawall, which is a paved trail along Stanley Park, and hiked the Grouse Grind, which is a 2.9km 800m hike on Grouse Mountain.

The weather cooperated as best it could, and my friends Jeff and Christine got married.

I returned to Peace River tonight to observe that the caterpillars had indeed taken over, and all was lost with the world.