Alberta - More Stories I Wish I Could Tell
A rapid-fire roundup of stories from Alberta and a farewell to this magnificent province - for now!
EPISODE NOTES
Someone got mad at me because I had less total videos in this Alberta series than I had in my Rideau Canal series. I really wanted to tell her that I would be happy for her to fund a longer trip so I could shoot more. I didn’t.
Alberta’s war on rats is a bucket list story for me. Some day I will do it justice.
TRANSCRIPT
We have sadly come to the end of this miniseries on Alberta. Like I said way back at the start, I was there for just five nights. Shamefully short time to even scratch the surface of what this province has to offer.
We’re talking about a place with five national parks, more than a hundred provincial parks and six UNESCO world heritage sites.
Home to 587 catalogued vertebrate species - 10 amphibians, 93 mammals, 411 birds, 8 reptiles and 65 fish. Of which I saw… I dunno, 10?
So to wave goodbye, for now, to Alberta, I wanted to at least mention a few stories I wish I’d had more time to tell.
Alberta has the biggest beaver dam in the world - 850 meters long, in the remote wilds of Wood Buffalo National Park. It was only found thanks to Google Earth and the tenacity of Jean Thie who first spotted it in 2007. Matching older aerial photography tells us it’s been there since at least 1990.
One place I wanted to shout out is Nose Hill Park at the north end of Calgary. An 11 kilometer square plateau with gorgeous views of the skyline. It’s surrounded by the city but it can make you feel like you’ve disappeared into the prairies in the most transportive way. And it’s only here thanks to grass roots efforts in the 1970s to stop commercial and residential development of the area, giving us this oasis where you can see both downtown and the distant rockies.
We visited Grotto Creek Canyon for the story of their mysterious pictographs. It also has a garden of stone figures left by presumably well-meaning visitors. But these kind of figures are controversial for two reasons. One, they’re often built to superficially resemble Inuksuit, which have deep cultural heritage for the Inuit and function as a complex symbolic language, not just a cute ‘I was here’. They’re also looked down on by some hikers, who rely on purposeful stone cairns to point the way on vague routes. Building them for fun can muddle the messages and even get people lost. So it’s just things to consider before you decide you just have to stack some rocks.
And of course I have to mention: Alberta is rat free. Norway rats were introduced on the east coast of Canada around 1775 and spread westward. But in 1950, as they started to cross the border, Alberta drew a line in the prairies. They established a rat control zone 600km long and 29km wide, and have been successfully stamping out incursions ever since through on-the-ground control methods and some pretty intense propoganda.
OK - that is it for Alberta, at least until next time. I cannot wait for another chance to explore it. And I’ll be right back here next week with the story of a very strange lake - one of only twelve of its kind in Canada.