Since I was let go from General Dynamics almost two weeks ago I’ve just had one busy day after the next. Going out for coffee with friends or with former colleagues, driving out to Strathmore in the MG with my brother Brian on his birthday, getting the spring-time yardwork done or going hiking with my brother Scott – who has time to think about finding work? I have spent some time thinking about the things that I enjoy and am good at; I’ve even done a bunch of career/aptitude assessment quizzes to provide some food for thought. I’d really like to make sure that the next job is challenging and, importantly, with an organization that suits my work-style and values. Maybe a smaller company next time, or some contracting jobs to round out my skills in certain areas, who knows?
In the meantime, the days are scooting by. This week on Tuesday it was a glorious day for mid-April – sunny, fairly calm and about 22 °C. Scott had a gap between painting jobs, so we took our mountain bikes out to Kananaskis and made our way to the Canyon Creek Ice Cave. Years ago, the parking lot was at the end of about 6 km of gravel road heading north from Highway 66. The old parking lot is now a well pad for a Shell sour gas well and the parking is back by the highway, thus the mountain bikes. The road is in good shape and used by Shell employees, but not accessible except on foot or bike. Scott and I took about an hour to ride in to the trail head, locked the bikes to a tree and headed along the creek to the path up to the cave.
It’s quite a steep scramble up pretty loose scree in places, very rubble-y and not that much fun. I complained a lot, ‘cuz I’m wimpy and out of shape; complaining really helps! The other thing that helps is to stop and take pictures, lots of pictures – and take a bit of time to fiddle with the settings on the camera. It’s all about the art of photography.
After about 40 minutes of grumbling and panting like an old dog chasing a rabbit, we made it to the cave entrance. After the exertion of the climb and the warm day, the cold temperature in the cave was quite refreshing. There was very little ice in the cave, just a few short stalagmite-like pillars of ice here and there. I’d expected more ice in April. The main (“tourist”) chamber is fairly well lit as the cave entrance faces south and it was easy to get 40 or 50 meters into the cave with out any additional light. We hadn’t bothered to bring a flashlight with us so didn’t want to risk a slip or twisted ankle in the dark – bad enough that we kept messing up our dark-adapted eyesight with flash photos! We probably poked about in the cave for about 15 minutes before we headed out into the warm sunshine and sat on a ledge overlooking the valley and ate our lunch.
The hike down the slope was a bit tricky in the loose rock, but at least it went quite a bit quicker than the uphill. We found our bikes and ground our way up the first kilometer up to the high point of the road, paused for a photo op and then made excellent time on the mostly downhill run back to the parking lot. The round trip took us about 4 hours. It really was a great day and it encourages me that I should be getting in shape and doing more of this. Scott is a pretty enthusiastic hiker and scrambler and I’m trying to convince him (and me!) that we should do enough hiking this year that I could summit a 10000’ peak before this year’s hiking season is out.
There are a couple of little scrambly bits near the top but we stopped just before the second one as we’d used up half of our time. I was a little disappointed not to make it to the top. The disappointment did fade some on the trip back down when my knees started to give out. The last half hour getting back to the car was pretty painful and I was glad that we’d not gone any further!
