Dateline: Banff, Alberta. Weather continues horrible, at least for July. Gray skies, rain, and no appreciable warmth can be found. You may want to check out the headline above from the Calgary Sun, and particularly the subhead. The northern Rockies and plains aren’t getting much summer. This makes it hard to accept vastly expensive and intrusive governmental programs designed to curb “global warming.” In this part of the continent, they’d like to experience some global warming. Canadians are a hardy lot; a fair few of them were out hiking in the rain today. Not my cup of tea…oh, well.
Today we drove the Bow Valley Parkway and then crossed Vermilion Pass to Radium Hot Springs, that is in Kootenay National Park just across the continental divide in British Columbia. We saw a lot of beautiful landscapes in moody water color tones. Not much wildlife on display, I suspect they were all under trees staying dry. We did see a couple of deer and the usual scampering rodents – mostly tree and ground squirrels.
Radium Hot Springs is a classical old fashioned spa, with no actual relation to the element radium. It was started shortly after Marie Curie discovered radium, a material with magical (at the time) properties. In the hope of inferring magical healing properties to its hot waters, it was named Radium. Today the pools were full of swimmers, soakers, divers, and paddlers, people who had found a warm place to spend part of a cold day. To me that makes more sense than hiking in the rain.
Tomorrow we will see the first showing of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince here in Banff. I will have a movie review for you tomorrow night. I’m a little bummed that this film was ready to show last Christmas but was held off the market for “scheduling” (aka profit) reasons. That isn’t exactly playing fair with the fan base. Time-Warner didn’t win any friends holding it for a time when they believe it will make more money.
