So this is what you do on weekends around here?

So I've been in Calgary for a week now - figured it was time for an update.

I spent last week searching for both work and a new home. No real developments on the job front yet - but that will take a couple weeks. Home-wise I have several appointments this week to view apartments and townhouses, thankfully rentals are much more affordable in this town than in Toronto.

My long weekend was amazing - reminded me why I had moved here after all. I went to Waterton National Park on the Alberta, Montana border. We had planned on going to Banff but iffy weather changed our plans at the last minute (which proved to be a great choice!).

Tatiana, her friends Giselle, Kent and I packed up our mountain bikes and camping gear for a fun filled weekend. We arrived in Waterton around 11pm (it's less than 3 hours from Calgary). Sadly all the campsites in the main campground were full, as were all the sites in the secondary site... so out of options we drove to the lake and set up our tents beside the beach (which seemed like a great idea). Just as everyone crawled into their sleeping bags - the winds started, and got stronger and stronger... The winds blasted our tents with gale force-like winds, thankfully my aerodynamic-ish tent faired well - Kent's tent didn't do so well, though never totally collapsing he had to constantly hold the tent up from crashing down on him. Needless to say no one slept very well.

Saturday was mountain biking day - we took this great trail up to a beautiful lake surrounded by peaks, though constantly uphill and rocky we had a blast huffing and puffing our way up.

Pic of Kent showing me how he can flip over the handlebars yet stay on his feet - amazing!



Then the fun part - riding down... a 15 minute ride all downhill - through some tricky yet super-duper-fun sections we bombed our way down! Later we discovered that if the girls took us in the car around the mountain we could do the fun downhill ride again with minimal hills to climb. This second time around I had a little give'r in me and hucked my way down the steeper sections.

At one point I hit a lip, caught some air and landed like a champ (sadly my back brake wasn't working - something happened to the hydralic fluid when the bike was shipped to me) so I couldnt scrub off the speed I had picked up, I had just enough control to steer the bike to the only non-rocky section and came to a stop in a bush! Finishing the trail we thought all the excitement was over until we saw the bear - a good sized black bear was chompin down on barries by the roadside - we watched for a while in awe.

We ended up getting a great campsite on sat night in the main campground so we slept like babies after a phenominal day of riding in the mountains - dispite years of mountain biking, I had never ridenmy bike on a mountain!




Sunday was scrambling day - we set our sites for the Akima Ridge - a highly recommended 20+km scramble high in the mountains that took us along a beautiful ridge - hitting 4 seperate peaks (2 of those being over 8000 feet). We had amazing weather throught the hike - the winds obviously were quite strong on the peaks. We ended up finishing the circuit in 6 hours - not too bad for a bunch of east coasters (we're all from either toronto or Nova Scotia).




























Today I went climbing in Canmore at Grassi Lakes with my new climbing buddy Mike and his wife Claire. Dispite chilly temps we had a great day at this outdoor gym! I haven't sport climbed since our time at Smith Rocks in Oregon almost a month ago!