Spikey Paintbrush Island

Holiday weekend found us enjoying our time in the mountains. It started off on Friday night with a free concert at the civic centre where CKUA radio station was broadcasting live from Canmore and introduced one of the main performers who was lined up to be performing live on the main stage at the Folk festival over the weekend. We sat on the grass and enjoyed the music, while heather and Finlay danced for over 2 hours.

The following day we managed our first trips this year to one of my favorite parts of the area...Kananaskis provincial park. It has a beautiful pave bike path and we enjoyed a ride through the mountains, Finlay behind James and Heather helping me on the tag-a-long.We enjoyed a picnic by the river before heading out on the bikes we went a little bit further than normal and continued past a sign that said "Bear in area" Heather and Finlay enjoyed yelling "Yo Bear" at the top of their voices disturbing the peace for the oncoming cyclist, however brought a smile to their faces. Once back at the truck the kids were sat on the tail gate as James and I sorted out the bikes and snacks and all of a sudden Finlay yells out "there's a bear!!!" and sure enough about 20 metres away was a black bear coming out of the trees, sauntered across the road and quickly and quietly passed back into the trees on the other side, there were a few people milling around and we had just passed some people setting of on their bikes and people had been picnicing, however the bear may have chosen his time to come into the open briefly and nobody else noticed this silent,brief and swift passing of wildlife. Unfortunately I had just put my camera back in the truck and was in such awe that by the time that it registered to take a photo, the bear had vanished.

The following day we took the canoe up to Spray Lakes which is a reservoir and loaded everybody into the canoe, this was quite an interesting trip as when we were paddling we noticed that on the bottom of the lake there were hundreds of tree stumps which had been cut down. We realised that this had once been part of the forest and as we ventured further we came to a point where there were just rocks at the bottom. Obviously this had been once the river that had run through the valley before they had flooded it and made it into a reservoir.This river still feeds the reservoir and you can see the flow of the river in the water.

We found a little island, well a knoll in the middle of the resrvoir and decided to picnic there. On the island there were Indian paint brush plants which had lost their petals and were just about to turn to seed. At this point they look like paint brushed, so Finlay and Heather picked some, took them home  and created some lovely paintings at the end of the day.

Picnic on Paint Brush Island