Archives

My dad used to derive a quiet pleasure from driving our family’s station wagon past stuck four-wheel-drives. Alberta’s foothills and mountains had few good roads in the 1960s. Dad took things [...]

Spring draws nigh: the season of the birds and the bees. Birdsong is a welcome gift, but where would we be without bees? Their obsessive quest for pollen and nectar keeps much of Alberta’s native [...]

A few years ago Sykes Powderface and I visited a mouldering old cabin in Banff National Park. He told me a Chinese immigrant market gardener who once lived there used to trade vegetables to [...]

Winter: trees stand leafless in the snow and animals seek shelter from bitter winds. Most birds have left. Of those that stay, many survive by scavenging the remains of the season’s victims. [...]

Very early this morning, headlights crept down rural roads across Alberta, turned in to the edges of fields and woodlands, and blinked out. Had you been there, you might have heard the muffled [...]

Calm September days can feel almost surreal in central Alberta. A sleepy stillness lies over the aspen groves and prairies. Time seems suspended. That breathless autumn beauty surrounded me the [...]

Why is it that we choose so often to replace the sublime with the ridiculous? Take, for example, the miracle of photosynthesis. It arose, scientists believe, almost 3.5 billion years ago. Life [...]

Digging a mine in a river would be stupid, right? Well, in Alberta we do it regularly. Ric Hauer tells the story of a new municipal water well drilled a kilometre away from Montana’s Flathead [...]

Two years ago Alberta elected an NDP government. Right-wing pundits forecast disaster. Environmentalists were optimistic. The optimists may have been right. The NDP inherited many environmental [...]

It should have been easy but it wasn’t. It should have been easy because the headwaters of the Castle, Carbondale and Waterton rivers were always meant to be a park. Until 1928 the windy mountain [...]