I’ve just spotted a place on the map called the Anarchist Provincial Park which has turned out to be not, as I’d hoped, a secure state-sponsored resting place for ageing punks but yet another tree refuge. This one is dedicated to ‘underrepresented lowland trees such as the Douglas fir’ so I can only assume it was founded, financed and managed by Canada’s blindest man.
Anyway, we sat in Fernie for a week to see how Emily’s leg would heal then decided to move on. In fairness to the place, it has the most incredible powder skiing I have ever seen and probably will ever see. If I owned a helicopter I wouldn’t heli-ski, I’d trade it in for a condo at Fernie and a bus pass. There’s so much damn snow you don’t need to go looking for it, and it’s so light and dry it’s like boarding on air.
Trouble is, there’s bugger all else to do if you’re not on the slopes and we were stuck between a rock and a hard place – either Em’s waiting for me with nothing to do or I’m looking wistfully out the window at a powder day gone a-begging. That’s no fun for either of us, and as you can see it's not the easiest place for the injured to get about. Fun to watch though.Still, while we were making our minds up I snuck in a few crafty half days on the slopes. First runs in the morning invariably meant over a foot of untouched, unmarked powder (on piste!) which it would be rude not to ride. I hooked up with some local boarders and had a merry time trying to kill myself, a few cheeky moments outside the ski and avalanche boundaries and even managed to fall off a cliff. Yes, had I known it was going to happen I would have phoned home in advance and arranged some sort of sponsorship for the event, but I didn’t, and it was only a small cliff anyway.
Don’t look like that. It’s actually surprisingly easy to do if you’re trying to keep your speed up in deep powder in the trees (if you don’t you're digging yourself out of a hole for twenty minutes at a time). There’s no visibility anyway, and there isn’t always land on the far side of the next tree. Cliffs happen.
Sensibly Em chose to drown her sorrows in the local bar rather than ride them off a cliff. She battered the causes of feminism and disabled rights in one particularly glorious evening of beer and pool with shouts of 'Oi, midget! How does it feel to be beaten by a crippled girl. Huh? In front of all yer mates. Huh? Huh?' Even repeatedly wedgie-ing the gobshite-mouthed cripple had little effect – she simply slugged more tequila, insisted I was slurring (when in fact it was her hearing that was slurred) and demanded a piggyback to the next bar. Chrissie, she says she gets her social skills from you?
When she’d recovered from that hangover, she hit the video rental store. This is not a good thing. Never, ever let Emily loose with a video rental card unless you want to sit through six hours of DVDs about dragons, puppies, breathless Buffy-clones who speak with continually rising inflections, and ponies whose best friends are also dragons and who will eventually win the big rosette when all the popular ponies have some kind of pony epiphany. The word 'like' features heavily in sentences, but zombies are banned because they're bad.
Sorry, I've just been told they're not bad, they're scary, especially in Shaun of the Dead which didn’t have any ponies whatsoever. Go figure.
Anyway, to keep from torturing ourselves over acres of snow, we decided to hit the road again at the weekend and get on with exploring Canada. We had an uneventful return down the treacherous H93, gave a quick finger to Kimberly in passing, and ambled across mountains and rivers to Nelson on the Kootenay lake, about a five-hour trip.
In hindsight, choosing to go through Summit Pass rather than take the ferry was not one of our cleverest moves (all the clues we needed were in the name). It started out ok(ish)….
...Then the weather closed in - but only once we'd passed the point of no return. Annoyingly, Canadians put their road closed barriers half way up single lane mountain roads which is really not a lot of help to those of us travelling in a bus.
As if things weren't tough enough already, there's 16km(!) of icy downhill to come just as we hit the cloud layer….
Once again Canada decides to take the piss …
Nice views though.
So now we’re in Nelson. It’s an ok town, about medium sized, on the edge of the Kootenay lake which is an amazing indigo grey colour. We’ve got a decent place to park, somewhere to crap, and even the TV works. We’re going to stay here a couple of days for the sheer luxury 
of it all. The local hill is Whitewater, so I’ll check that out soonish, and Em’s eying up the hot springs up the road at Ainsworth. Her knee’s getting better every day and another week should see her back (gently) on the slopes. We’ll probably head onto Rossland (Red Mountain) on the US border, then north to Kelowna (Big White) and Kamloops (Sun Peaks), before the longer haul to Whistler, and back via Revelstoke. Something like that anyway.*******************************
JB/10/2/08/On navigation
For all those of you who’ve scoffed at Emily’s navigational skills (or been booked into a hotel in a different city), she’s doing great at it. I won’t hear a word said against her, or the way she
rotates the map three times clockwise and twice anti-clockwise then checks her feet before making a directional pronouncement. I simply assume that left is right and vice versa and keep the requirements simple (Canada Good, America Bad, that sort of thing) and eventually we get somewhere.Let’s just say that today was an unusual day, rather like the Blackadder Goes Forth (WWI) episode where they end up in no-man’s land painting elephants. To paraphrase:
‘So George, have a look at the map and tell us where we are’
‘Well Cap, we appear to be in some sort of a field of mushrooms’
‘That’s a Military map leftenant, they are unlikely to have marked interesting flora and fungi. Look at the key.’
‘It says ‘Mine’, sir. Gosh, so the man who made the map owns the field as well…’
Replace George with Emily, and metres for mushrooms and you’ll understand why we ended up trying to take a 30ft van without snowchains through a mile high mountain pass today:
‘Are there any numbers on the map that might suggest elevation to you?
(very long pause) ‘Um. No… Oh wait. It says 1774m… is that anything to do with what you’re asking?
Actually this is all very unfair and simply serves to perpetuate the idea that Emily can’t navigate. She can and she does. She’s just chooses not to sometimes to keep me on my toes.
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JB/10/2/08/Why Canada, why?
Help me out here. Am I the only person who finds it disturbing that the petroleum dispensation technician at the local gas station is smoking a cigarette while he fills up the van, and he asks me to check that the ignition is turned off 'just in case'? He's not the only one either, petrol station forecourts appear to be the outdoor venue of choice for staff and customers alike. What are they going to do when I try to buy propane, light a fucking bonfire?
Canadians are just very laid back people. For example, the official approach to traffic intersections is a ‘take your turn’ basis. Admittedly it takes a solar eclipse for two cars or more to be on the same stretch of road in some parts of the country, but when they are, they do and it works. Can’t see it happening in London somehow.
Here’s one for all the concerned parents back home – this is a country where four quarters equals a Loony and yet their kids can still do fractions. So what happened to yours?
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JB/10/2/08/New tech
It occurs to us that perhaps we should credit who we're leeching off when we post this stuff. We used Starbucks in Montreal, Super 8 Motels in Dallas, Hidden Ridge resorts in Banff, and even (forgive our sins) McWireless in Canmore. Globalisation really works. But as we’re getting deeper and deeper into Hicksville our Interweb communication largely depends on the masturbatory habits of Canadian teenagers searching for porn on unsecured home wireless networks. Staying in touch has become an erratic and slightly unsettling process.
The earliest Kimberly/Fernie post was courtesy of JonosComputorSux (sic). He was something of an awkward little tosser and, having discovered God or girlfriend, went offline with a vengeance.
For the rest of Fernie, we were riding with the DaveHome Network where one-handed computing is the preferred activity, 24/7. It's almost worth trying to track the signal down just to see what kind of half-blind, furry-palmed, RSI-raddled youth we find at the end of it (he says without any trace of either pot or kettle).
This latest post comes courtesy of the Klimes’s RV campground, and they’re a lovely elderly couple who would be shocked and appalled to be included in any such discussion. Screenwipes, anybody?
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