Blurred lines and bleary eyes in the basement kitchen again – people I don’t know, messing with convention … re-heating dinner for breakfast.
No wonder the elk is raging.
Leaving downtown Fernie for a side trip to the private lake resort, for a morning hike, down the long and winding unpaved road, wondering where life itself might be hiding.
Turns out it’s concealed in a luxury hotel, through the trees by a lake, overlooked by Rocky Mountain range peaks.
Industrial snowploughs and industrious portable toilets and oversized trucks congregating in the parking lot, which is threatening to overflow into the forest.
The lake trail, the fir trail, taking my chances on unknown loop trails; steep switchbacks offering little in the way of views, other than luminous colours of rare wildflowers and the flowing tears of an MOR waterfall.
Through a brief opening, a glimpse of mid-grey treeless peaks, looking down on all of this – gothic, smirking. They can’t help themselves.
On the paths and trails, a mixture of casual strollers and serious hikers. I’m somewhere between the two … walking, not crawling.
By late morning I call time, for an escape back to the main highway.
Up the Elk Valley to Sparwood, a Titanesque collection of all-American roadside franchises. And a whole coal industry around the back.
The unglittering memorial to fallen miners, with empty space reserved for future events / tragedies, is a sombre sight.
Besides this, the world’s largest truck, in a lurid shade of green usually reserved for muscle cars and drifters and Fast Fords.
You could get lost in here.
Further up the highway, I’m taking a turn-off into more remote parts, where trying to alter time and distance is an art form.
Finding myself on a winding unsurfaced road, twisting it’s way through valleys and peaks, all 55km of it.
And clear to see it’s nature in charge around here … the mountain wildlife making no attempt to move from the roadway on my approach, forcing me to edge my way very very slowly around them.
They scrutinise and study me, but never flinch. These deer own the goddamn road, and don’t I know it!
I am indebted to them – mainly for allowing me through, without charge.
This is a half hour which stretches and bends itself into one hour twenty, showering my car in shit and dirt; doing my best to avoid the worst of the ruts and all of the unnannounced gargantuan potholes.
This is wilderness, no human habitation for miles and miles around, other than – somewhat bizarrely – a bible camp for kids.
When I escape this, suddenly a joyously smooth ribbon of tarmac presents itself, with minimal traffic, incomprehensible scenery, bighorn sheep, imperfectly triangular peaks.
Shapes and shadows constantly shifting over the jagged landscape, on the move.
I’ve landed in another filmset.
Galloping down Highway 40 to Kananaskis Village, through K-Country, past the upmarket golf course, to find that the village stables are in fact a luxury lodge, with spa facilities.
There’s plenty of room for gentrification in tourism these days, and the residents are lapping it all up in their brand new brand-name hiking gear.
For me, real life can be found in and around the wilderness hostel … as long as you don’t mind being in a whodunnit.
Here’s Peter the fisherman, Carol the ever-smiling optimist, and Rosa the Catalan wanderer.
And over there, through the trees, a family of bears … cough, splutter.
Literally at the point where I’m about to sit down outside, to enjoy a cold one in the blazing sun, a cry floats through the air, warning of these goddamn bears.
We can’t complain that we weren’t warned, but ffs I don’t even get to sit down with a frickin’ beer!
Forced to stand up instead, loitering by the door, from which a head appears – one which I’ve not seen before and will never see again … sternly instructing Carol and I to get in the building, as if the forest is on fire.
We move perhaps two steps closer, and I continue enjoying my IPA on the reception decking, bears in the distance padding through the trees this way and that, putting on an early evening show for the two of us who can be bothered actually making an effort.
After marvelling at this for ten minutes, we reluctantly heed the advice and retire indoors.
In the kitchen, conversations and chat about travel exploits which are stirred into plain pasta, to be eaten and digested with a side order of Catalan politics.
After the update in separatism, I acquaint myself with a final tin of ale, taking it all in outside under star-freckled skies.
A moon occasionally illuminates the woodland scene, as I listen out for the bears rustling about in the trees.
An Outside World 