Urban Wetland

          After studying wildlife for a few seasons, I am still surprised to find that they aren't all just contained by some wilderness somewhere. There are quite a few that live in your own backyard. I routinely see more wildlife walking to class than I typically do on hikes in the wilderness (which I realize has more to do with how habituated they are, but still). 

        Despite having lived at my current place for 9 months, I recently stumbled upon a small wetland near my house for the first time. It is smack in the middle of developed residential neighborhoods, so I was not expecting much from a little duckpond.

      Bancroft Pond is small, but still bigger than I expected. Despite the path running through it, the area is obviously designed for waterfowl rather than people. In the middle of the city, it was surprising and lovely.

Ladiiiies?

      The redwing blackbirds were in an uproar, the males following the females and desperately trying to attract their attention. They obviously gave no craps about humans watching their love affairs. I sat by the pond, amused to watch their antics, when a little family popped out.

Mama eyeballing me despite my stealthy disguise.

I was reminded very much of my time in Alaska. I know it's just a Canada goose, but it is a magical thing anyway. Here in the middle of human residences, a wild little family is also eking out a living.

     On my next visit (in which I failed to bring a camera), a great blue heron peeked out from behind the reeds, and an American Coot swam around pretending it was a duck.

     Fortunately for humans, life is almost unstoppable. There are still a lot of amazing things out there worth protecting.

On a Good Day

Two weeks out from the finish of spring semester, I've been thinking about how fast college really goes. It seems like only a few months ago I was a timid freshman tiptoeing around campus, clutching my lanyard and school ID.

Two years ago, I wandered around the beautiful UM campus and realized that I wanted nothing more than to have friends to play Frisbee with on the lawn, or take silly trips on the weekends. I ached to have adventures, but they didn't mean much without people to share them.

Sunset over Fish Creek

Somehow in this time, I have managed to stumble into some truly wonderful, quirky people, whose company I do not deserve in the least. People who didn't mind braving rainy, cold, spring conditions to go camping with me, cracking jokes even when we couldn't get to our campsite because the road was snowed in.

We found a new site that was perfect anyway: along the banks of the gorgeous Fish Creek, among blooming trillium and the drumming ruffed grouse.

Use your imagination for the grouse.

Before dinner, eight of us hiked a nearby ridge to gain views of the valley. We stopped every few yards to ahhh over some new view, rock or flower. Our generation gets accused of not being in touch with the outdoors or nature, but none of us were there for any reason except that we wanted to be.

Absolute torture.

That evening, we cooked an enormous amount of food that even ten of us couldn't eat. I clumsily started a fire, and we hung out and played games in the firelight, staying miraculously dry from rain. I was foolishly happy the whole time. Hanging out with some good friends in the outdoors is pretty much all I have ever wanted from life.

Plus cool wildflowers!

I'm probably kind of simple, that way.

Dream Vacation

It's that time of year when college students flee somewhere warm and dry for a week, hopefully to escape the dreary Missoula spring weather. Unless you're crazy, that is, and decide to go farther north to chase the receding snow just so that you can camp in it and freeze your ass off.
       
Guilty! My very best adventure buddy and I loaded up the car and headed for Alberta to spend our spring break snowshoeing through deep crust and camping out in spring snowstorms. The Canadian Rockies were like nowhere we'd ever been before.

A scene like this ought to be narrated by Morgan Freeman.

This picture is of our trek to the toe of the Athabasca Glacier, my brother's obsession of the entire trip. I had to force him to stay off the glacier itself. Dying in a crevasse and becoming one with the glacier forever seemed not to bother him too much.

That's alright--I actually understood this sentiment. Dying in Banff amongst the towering peaks and extremes of life. . . you could a lot worse. (You know, if you HAD to die.)

For four days we explored, snowshoeing through some extreme avalanche territory, crossing semi-frozen lakes and negotiating icy trails and roads blocked in by snow. We got stuck only once in a parking lot, though that was nerve wracking enough. It was the middle of the Canadian wilderness and we had no cell service or snow shovel, a fact I keenly remembered at that point.

After the car got stuck we were both a little shaken, especially when the snow began to flurry and the clouds descend. There wasn't an open winter campsite around for hours of driving. When I saw a sign for an open hostel in the middle of nowhere, like a little winter oasis placed there just for us, I hurried to pull over. HI-Rampart Creek Wilderness Hostel turned out to be another wonderful part of the journey, being our first time ever staying in a hostel. As soon as we saw the heated rooms with bunk beds we were sold. Besides, the guy running the hostel seemed like he had been alone for days, possibly months, with only his adorable dog Dana for companionship.

Our last day in Canada was magic. We woke well rested from the hostel to peer outside and see that the clouds had lifted, and it was going to be a beautiful day in the Rockies.

Almost right away we came across a wolf bounding gracefully down the highway. He stayed for a few moments in front of us before leaping over the side of the road and disappearing into the valley below. It was my first time seeing a wolf in the wild, and I think I see what all the fuss is about now.

The weather held the entire day, through our trek to the glacier and exploration of steep, dramatic canyons filled with ice falls. At the end of the day we worked our way back to Banff town, which is pretty charming when you look past extensive tourism. Also, I am of legal age in Banff, so my brother and I capped off our trip with a few drinks at the bar while watching a local band, whose members wore cutoff jeans and no shoes, play songs like "I'm at Home Getting Hammered While She's Out Getting Nailed."

Despite sleeping out in a snow flurried campground that night, we stayed warm and neither of us wanted to leave in the morning. We'd been living out a dream, and nobody wants to wake up from that--but eventually it is time to return to the real world. My brother is graduating this spring and his life is moving on to working a job in Denali National Park and wherever he wants to go after that. And it's time for me to finish up the semester with as much grace as I can manage, and set off on my own new adventure alone in the Arctic tundra.

Life moves on, but we'll always have the pictures.