Vancouver is known for its mild weather - there are no extremes. In the three years I’ve been here we have never had a proper storm - you get two flashes of lightning and a rumble of thunder and that’s it, storm over.

This weekend everything changed. A beautiful and hot sunny day turned in a wild stormy night. There were at least 2 storms circling round our house, coming in from the East. I’ve never seen so much lightning - it was forking down and dancing across the sky and was so pretty. Crashing thunder and heavy rain completed the picture. Once the storms had started to pass over us on their way downtown the sun set and caused the sky to turn such a magnificent shade of orange that I just had to go out in the pouring rain and thunder to look at it in awe. We can’t actually see the sun set from where we live, but you could tell that the sunset was totally stunning.

There were fireworks scheduled for Saturday night - South Africa’s entry in the Festival of Light. We were sure they were going to cancel it, but no. 300,000 people still turned up and were treated to fireworks in a thunderstorm - South Africa v God. God won, hand’s down.

Here is a video - a time-lapse of photos taken over the 24 hours showing the sunny day, the storm, the sunset and the fireworks:

Time-lapse Vancouver July 25th

And here’s a still from the same camera showing the incredible orange sky. This hasn’t been doctored at all and as we all know pictures of sunsets never show how beautiful it really is - still it is pretty apocolyptic.

An interesting article in the Vancouver Sun today

Humans are not going to stop wanting to spread out into beautiful wilderness areas, constructing houses and homesteads that encroach onto the traditional territory of wild animals, but the importance of preserving wildlife corridors to enable cougars, bears and other predators to get from one side of their habitat to another without having to come into contact with humans is essential to stop this currently small issue becoming a major problem.

We’ve been talking about it for over a year, and last weekend we finally had our first climb! We never got round to doing an indoor course and decided that learning out in the open in beautiful scenery would be much better anyway. We joined our friends Ruth and Dave, Brigitte and Tim in the Cal-Cheak area just outside Whistler, which has many different climbs for different abilities. I initially just went along to watch and hang out with the guys and maybe learn a bit of belaying but once I was there and had seen Graham do a climb and make it look pretty easy I decided to have a go.

We started off on a 5.5 (5.4 being the rating of the easiest climbs you can do) - I only ended up getting half way up because my feet were killing me in my borrowed climbing shoes. I’m not sure if it was because they were too tight or because I was flexing my feet in a way I never have before, or because I was wearing socks when I should have been barefoot, but when I got over the crux (the hardest part of the climb) I had to beg Dave to lower me because my feet felt so crippled. It was disappointing not to get to the top, but it was enjoyable enough that I have commited to trying it again.

Graham was a natural and he really loved it.

He went on to climb a 5.6 and a 5.8 before the end of the day, which looked a lot more scary than this little cliff. He’ll definitely be going back for more!

And on the way home we saw our first bear of the season munching grass along the highway.

The big news round here lately has been about the recent rash of cougar sightings and attacks in Squamish, BC. At the weekend a cougar attacked and killed a dog that was on the Stawamus Chief hiking trail with its owners (on-leash), and attacked another dog. It was emaciatied so likely was killing to survive. There is Youtube footage of the cougar taken by the owner, but I have no idea why he wasn’t sensible enough to just get the hell out of there.

On Tuesday, a 3-year old girl was attacked by a cougar while out walking in a park with her mother. I know this area well as it was where we were walking/snowshoeing at Christmas. It is not in the middle of the wilderness. It is a built up residential area surrounded by forest and cougars should not be coming into populated areas like this unless there is something significantly wrong with their own territory or unless they have lost all fear of humans and see them as easy prey. The girl is OK - she got away with just a couple of minor injuries after the mother fought the cougar off. It seems that this one was well fed and likely a younger cougar practicing its hunting skills. Full story here.

Meanwhile, a dry, hot beginning to the summer has contributed to conditions that has allowed a wildfire to burn for almost a month now around the Tyaughton Lake area near Lillooet. The fire started on May 29th and has now reached 8000 hectares with many evacuation orders applied. The guys fighting this fire have had a hard job, but seem to be slowly getting things under control - it is now at 70% contained according to this most recent article. The skies around Vancouver have been hazy this last week due to the smoke from this fire - pretty amazing that the effects can be seen this far south of the fire. We’re all hoping for a bit of rain for once before more fires start springing up!

I really wish I owned this house:

Oh hang on, I do as of June 1st!!!

Life has been moving a bit quickly lately but in totally the right direction.

I haven’t written any blog posts in a while because I’ve been away in England. I’m back now and we’ve just bought a shiny new car after being car-free in Vancouver for two and a half years. We’re very much looking forward to getting out to new places at weekends and I’m looking forward to being able to blog about them!

Each year at the end of January, a whole bunch of restaurants participate in Dine Out Vancouver - a  2 week foodie extravaganza. Each restaurant comes up with a 3-course menu and sells it at $18, $28 or $38. Reservations go very quickly at the most exclusive restaurants but there always seem to be plenty of tables at medium to higher-end restaurants that normally the average person wouldn’t go to because it is on the expensive side.

We’re not going to take advantage of it this year due to having to pretend we are paupers in an effort to save for our upcoming house-purchase (when we will be paupers). But it has been very difficult to resist, especially as there are a few restaurants participating that I have wanted to try out for ages, such as Bacchus, C, Diva at the Met, Joe Fortes, La Terrazza, Raincity Grill and the William Tell Restaurant.

Ah! I’m salivating now. There’s always next year, right? Right?

This year the IIHF World Junior Hockey Championship was played in Ottawa and I got to watch plenty of the games on television. The level of hockey played was surprisingly good and although no fighting is allowed in the Juniors, there was plenty of raw emotion, competitiveness and aggression from all sides. Canada went undefeated throughout the entire tournament, posting wins over the Czech Republic (8-1). Khazakstan (15-0), Germany (5-1), The US (7-4), Russia (5-4 OT/SO) and Sweden (5-1) by a combined score of 45-11, the games against bitter rivals US and Russia being the most electrifying and exciting hockey I have seen outside of a Stanley Cup playoff match.

We thought it couldn’t get much better after the intensity of the matchup between Canada and the US, where Canada rallied back from a 3-0 deficit early in the first period to tie it before the period was over and then dominate from then on, but the Canada-Russia semi-final game was a pure nail-biter from start to finish; each time Canada scored the Russians scored one back straight away until late in the third period the Russians scored their first go-ahead goal with only a couple of minutes remaining. The situation looked futile right up until the point when Jordan Eberle scored with just 5.4 seconds to go in the game. The team and crowd went absollutely nuts, and that was enough to spur the team on through the overtime period and they eventually won in a shoot-out, with Eberle getting the shootout winner.

The best part of it all, though, was the fact that Cody Hodgson quietly went about his business of being the best player on the ice in all situations and ended up being the leading scorer in the whole tournament with 16 points. John Tavares got all the fanfare and the tournament MVP award for all his goal scoring prowess, but Hodgson got the nod from many analysts of the game, including TSN’s Bob McKenzie.

I am so incredibly happy that Mike Gillis drafted Cody last year and I can’t wait to see him on ice in a Canucks jersey, hopefully as early as next season., because he’s way too good for another year playing in Junior and he’s not yet old enough to play in the AHL. I haven’t ever been as excited about a player’s development - he’s the first player I’d consider blowing $225 on a named jersey for!

We spent our last day in Bella Coola on various hikes around the Bella Coola area on the hunt for Grizzly Bears. We had arranged for a local guide - Doug Baker - to come and pick us up and take us to the areas where there would likely be bear activity.

We searched over a very wide area, we saw loads of signs of grizzly bears and cubs - from fresh poop full of berries, to bear rubbings on trees with fur attched, to recent scratch marks on trees, to paw prints.

At one point we circled back on ourselves and discovered signs of bear activity that weren’t there the first time we had walked past that spot, so it was pretty obvious that particular bear was tracking us rather than the other way around! We were very close to bears all day, but we never actually saw one - in a way I’m glad they were so elusive as if a bear had smelled and heard us coming and not run off or hidden, then it would have been a bear that is not scared of silly humans and their 2 canisters of bear spray, so it might not have been a very nice encounter anyway. There had been a bear attack early in the Spring just a few Kilometres from Suntree Cottages which had shaken the community a bit.

Next time  (because there will be a next time!) I would make full use of Doug’s 4×4 and explore some of the lovely lakes, waterfalls and volcanoes in the area and forget about bear spotting. But we had a nice day anyway, especially in the morning when we spent a good deal of time walking around the huge old-growth cedar trees in Snootli Creek Regional Park.

We also enjoyed walking alongside the various rivers en-route to the edge of Tweedsmuir National Park.

Doug was a very knowledgable, interesting and friendly guy and it was good to hear about all of his experiences of living in the valley. If you ever fly into Bella Coola in the winter and the plane can’t land at Hagensborg airport  due to the weather, then you will land at Anahim Lake at the top of The Hill and in all likelihood it will be Doug who comes to pick you up in a big school bus and drives you down to Hagensborg and Bella Coola. If you’re lucky (or unlucky, depending on your view of things) he’ll share some of his poetry with you.

Getting to Telegraph Cove was a nightmare. We were running late leaving Gold River because the floatplane trip took longer than planned, so we decided to take the 84Km logging road to Woss rather than take Highway 28 back east 92 km to Campbell River then north on highway 19 for 129 km to get to the same place - we figured it would cut half-an-hour to an hour from our travel time. We had been assured by a local that the logging road was better than the one to Tahsis, which had been slow going but manageable.

About 40 minutes into the drive I was getting panicky as the road certainly wasn’t better than the Tahsis road - it was horrific, we hadn’t passed a single car for 35 minutes, and there hadn’t been any little roadside signs directing us towards Highway 19 for about the same length of time. Added to that we seemed to be climbing further up a mountain, the posts marking how many kms we’d done didn’t seem to match the actual kms of the Woss road, and my Spidey senses were telling me that we were driving in the wrong direction. It was decision time - carry on and risk getting totally lost on a deserted mountain at night, with no cell phone signal, a gps which didn’t help at all and the knowledge that if we broke down no one would pass us and no one would know we were missing, or turn back and take the long way round to Woss - that would be 40 minutes back on the logging road, plus 3 and a half hours on the highways to Telegraph Cove.

After a bit of arguing we chose the safest option and turned back. Towards the end of the road, we looked extra hard at the last junction we had passed before getting lost up the mountain. The junction had a big sign directing people towards a lake 5 kms down the road, which we had seen. Next to that sign, and half hidden behind a bush was a tiny sign pointing to Highway 19. We were so annoyed but laughed because we were so relieved that we had found the right road. So we took it, and wished to god that we hadn’t as it was an arduous drive and nearly killed our poor little hire car. It took forever, and we got to Woss about an hour and a half later than we would have if we’d had taken the longer highway route in the first place. Then we had another hour’s drive to Telegraph Cove where we were staying. The husband fell into bed as soon as we arrived at our accommodation, poor monkey.

We learned that day never to take logging roads for more than about 10kms without a four-wheel drive, and definitely not to take them unless we have a backcountry road map with us. The maps I saw over the next couple of days didn’t have the road we were travelling on marked at all, but I finally found one that showed me that if we had carried on on that road we would either have ended up at a dead end by a lake at the top of the mountain, or if we had taken a different fork we would have eventually driven back down onto, highway 28 but only about 30kms along from Gold River - so it would have taken us over 2 hours to get 30 kms east.