Tales of Trails, Mountains and Rocky Roads

We've been talking about "wild" camping in Alberta for a while now, but we've never really known where we could legally camp, nor which areas of the province fall under public lands aka Crown Land. Official campgrounds are always fully booked months in advance, and being spur of the moment people, we don't always like to plan out our lives months in advance, preferring instead to live from day to day and have fun along the way. A couple of months ago, I was chatting with my boss at work, and he mentioned that he'd been out to Abraham Lake on a long weekend, and whilst he'd not camped out there, he  did say that it was public land and you could camp there for free. I'd heard of Abraham Lake but hadn't really done much reading about it. I knew it was out near Nordegg on the road to Saskatchewan Crossing which sits on the Icefields Parkway, but other than that, I didn't really know much else about the area. I also wasn't sure how comfortable I...

Just two weeks after the Canadian Death Race, we found ourselves back in the mountains again, this time at Lake Louise in Banff National Park. Being quite spontaneous, we often find ourselves making last minute plans, and having found a vacant site at the campground just a couple of days before, we hit that reserve button and gathered our camping gear for a two night trip to the mountains. There is no doubt that I would be in the mountains far more if I lived closer - when we lived in Calgary, I was out there every weekend either running or hiking, but it's not as easy when it's a 4 hour drive from home. This time, I wanted to make some time for trail running or hiking, plus we were also going to be filming a new video for my YouTube channel  which would mean sleeping in a bivvy with Wilson overnight from Saturday to Sunday. It was a great weekend, and whilst I didn't get the run in that I wanted, I did manage an awesome 7-mile hike with the pups, and we certainly got some ...

Heading into the Canadian Death Race, I was hopeful of running a sub 18 hours this time, but also realistic in that a sub 18 was unlikely and perhaps somewhat ambitious. The earlier part of this year was spent doing my long runs on the track as I prepared for a 24-hour track race that was just six weeks ago - going from pancake flat to mountain running within such a short window was always going to be a challenge.   We had originally planned on staying at tent city as we had done previously, but sadly a friend had to defer his entry due to injury so we took his hotel room instead, Whilst I love my camping, the thought of a hotel room the night before sounded fantastic and I was quite relieved not to have to faff a round with a tent when we arrived in Grande Cache late afternoon on the Friday.   Arriving in town, it was already extremely warm and the wildfire smoke from the BC fires was pretty bad, Conditions for race day were going to get even worse, but I had been f...