Blair's Blog

The kids had a professional day on Friday, so I took a vacation day to make a 4-day weekend for Victoria Day. Friday started out nice and sunny and I managed to get a bunch of yard work done before we tossed overnight bags into the van and drove to Banff in the afternoon.

It was a nice drive out, there is still a lot of snow in the front ranges and the peaks were still crowned with white snow. We arrived into Banff and spent the afternoon poking in and out of the shops on Banff Avenue. By dinner time we were all pretty hungry and had the carb-lover’s special at The Olde Spaghetti Factory – we’d eaten there last year with the kids and that’s where they wanted to have supper!

After the obligatory hour to digest, we headed for the pool at the hotel. The kids vetoed the Upper Hot Springs, because it’s a “boring pool that you can’t play in”. Apparently they have not learned the value of a relaxing soak at the end of the day…

Saturday morning was bright and sunny and, after breakfast, we drove out to Lake Louise. I don’t think that I’ve been to the lake for about 20 years and I’ve never done any of the trails in the area, so we took a walk down the shoreline trail. The rest of the family turned back after awhile, but I went to the end of the lake – then had to hot-foot it back to meet up with the others.

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The kids had the day off yesterday because of some kind of professional day for the teachers. It was also my compressed Friday, so the whole family was off on a weekday – not something that happens very often. Even though the weather this past week has been miserable for April (ten or twenty centimeters of snow and temperatures around -10°C most days), Friday morning was sunny and the forecast was for temperatures above zero. We decided that it would be an OK day for a family road trip to Banff.

As we got into the National Park, the sun was bright and the skies mostly clear. We drove up the 1A to Johnston’s Canyon – I hadn’t been to the falls since I was a kid. There was a fair bit of snow on the path and the catwalks and it was a little slippery, but not too bad. There were quite a few people on the trail but not so many that we couldn’t stop and toss snowballs into the open pools of water in the creek. The lower falls were covered in ice and the water was rushing down behind the ice – it was quite neat to see at this time of year.

After the hike we headed into Banff, ready for some lunch. We went to the Old Spaghetti Factory and then afterwards walked down Banff Avenue. At one of the candy shops, a fellow was making a giant batch of maple fudge on a big marble table in the shop window, so we stopped and watched. It was really interesting and, of course, we had to go in and get sample to taste when the cook was done. And, of course, we had to buy some too!

Once we had bought our fudge and did a little more window shopping, we headed up Sulfur Mountain to the Upper Hot Springs and spent an hour soaking in the hot water. We were in the pool just before sun set and the fading light on the snow covered peaks was quite nice.

It was 10:00pm before we got back home and poured our tired kids into their beds after a great day in the mountains.

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Saturday was a fantastic clear day in southern Alberta, a perfect day for a hike. My brother Scott is a fairly avid hiker/scrambler and wanted to hike the Windy Peak ridge in the southern Kananaskis. Our brother Brian joined us and we headed out late in the morning south through Okotoks and Black Diamond. We made a quick stop at the Okotoks Big Rock on the way through.

We got to “The Hump” on highway 532 about 12:30 and headed up the ridge. It’s a fairly easy walk and there was only a little snow left to deal with. The day was absolutely perfect – sunny, clear, about 18 °C and as calm as I’ve ever experienced in the mountains. The stillness was impressive, usually those ridges are just blasted by wind.

We walked about 2 km or so to the 2nd peak along the ridge (just before Timber Creek Pass on the map) where we stopped and had a late lunch. The view across the foothills and out onto the prairie was spectacular. We could even see the buildings in downtown Calgary on the horizon – almost exactly 100 km away as the crow flies. We started too late in the day to go much further and we could see that there was more snow along the next section of the trail so we headed to the truck and back to the city.

Hopefully this is a good start to doing a little more hiking this year, I can’t remember when I last went on a hike this early in the season.

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One of my goals for this blog is to see if I can set things up to make it easy to post sets (galleries) of photos. I tried to get Gallery2 up and running because there is a WordPress plugin called WPG2 that allows for “easy” integration with WordPress. Sadly, I never found out if the integration works because Gallery2 wouldn’t even install. It drops its install files outside of the apache document root and if you just copy them over, stuff breaks. So I abandoned that approach.

I am already using a program called webimage which works fairly well, but it is dated and limited ease of use. It is pretty powerful if you spend enough time in the weeds of the php code. I’ve used it for web galleries for www.newpaige.ca as well as for some family photos last Christmas. The trouble with webimage is that it doesn’t integrate seamlessly into the blog and would still require a lot of manual html/php manipulation, which I’d like to avoid.

So what else is there? WordPress recommends yapb in their online docs as “the easiest way to get started with photoblogging on WordPress”. It’s just a simple plugin, no messing around with installs on ubuntu, or configuring another database in mysql (still don’t really know how I got the WordPress database to work!). The only downside that I can see to this is that yapb is not a gallery, it’s philosophy is “One post, one image, one description”, so it doesn’t completely meet my goal of posting photo sets.

There you go – this post is a post with a photo using yapb. The picture is one of me hiking in Steve’s Canyon, near Exshaw, Alberta in September 2006.

Useful links:

Main yapb website and some installation instructions

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