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COLTS Entry 1: April 28, 2005

Well, here marks the beginnings of my 4-month summer journey in the Crowsnest Pass! It is already Friday–hard to believe how fast the time is racing along, especially since the program doesn't even officially start until this evening. So, what has happened in the meantime to eat up those precious seconds? Well, let's see....

Tuesday

I quit my cooking job on Tuesday, the 25th. It was a good day all around: I was working with people that I really enjoyed, I was training a new guy to replace some of my shifts & I was told to take 'er easy for the day by my boss. Nonetheless, time flew by & before I knew it, my last 8 hours as a line cook were over. Of course, I couldn't leave without making an exceptional mark on my life from that job, and it just so happened that at about 9 o'clock that morning, a couple hours into my shift, I was slicing 24 litres of mushrooms for the day's usage. About 22 litres into the repetitive ordeal, I accidentally got a bit carried away and began having some slicing fun on the tip of my thumb. The next thing I knew, I had a weird sensation at the tip of my left thumb, right beside the mushroom that I had finished slicing. Looking at my forlorn digit, I realised what had befallen me as a bright red substance started to run ever so delightfully from the outermost part of that appendage. Now, unlike my previous 6-stitch slice back in January, where I almost took off the whole pad of my ring finger while slicing onions, I just shaved off a tiny, tiny speck of my thumb this time. You wouldn't be able to tell that, however, from the amount of blood that this wound was producing. I must say, it was a veritable bleeder. No sooner had I cleaned the wound, applied a dressing to it, and cleaned up any potential food safety problems at the location where I injured myself than my poor little bandage had become soaked in red, drippy goodness. Thankfully, I had the foresight to cover the wound and dressing with a "finger condom," which at this time was quite red on the inside. So, guy that I am, I went back over to the first aid station & following my training, applied more pressure & more gauze overtop the old, soaking bandage. By this time, where was so much dressing that trying to cover the wound with a finger condom proved rather difficult, though I managed it but not without tearing a hole in the side of the latex cover. Seeing that blood was beginning to discolour the gauze already, I thought it prudent to roll on another finger condom overtop the previous, compromised one. Done. Back to work.

The day ended with me giving my boss & supervisors a card from one of my favourite collections: The Bud Light Institute's Greeting Cards for Men. The Bud Light Institute's motto, "Men helping men help men," is nothing short of gold, and so was the rather humorous card I gave to my co-workers. It's delightful greeting-card poem ended with, "I caught you a Muskie because I care." I love it.

Anyways, my boss gave me a big hug as I was heading out with some of the guys over to the lounge at our restaurant & said that she'll be looking forward to my return. She got off work a little bit later and joined us in the lounge for a final brewskie, wishing me good luck and farewell. And that was the end of that chapter.

Arriving home, I immediately set myself to work, diligently working at packing up the final remains of what was my room. My roommates will be moving out of our apartment come July(ish), so in order to make the whole ordeal smoothest for all parties involved, we decided to have me pack my stuff now & they'll move it along with their goods to our new abode–a house over in the Strathern region of Edmonton. I was up until 11:30 that night, packing away & ensuring that I had everything I needed for my four-month stint at Crowsnest Lake Bible Camp.

Wednesday

Got up at 7:30–a nice 3 hour sleep-in –and started the final bits of packing. I wanted to take a nice long shower that morning, but my roommate beat me to it. I had just enough time to whip in & out of the shower before my ride called, letting me know that he was sitting in his van at the entrance to my apartment. Quickly, I gathered my wits (and my gear) about me, quickly thought if I had everything & flew out the door. I greeted Jack, my ride, warmly & thanked him for picking me up. We hopped into his big white van & headed south, stopping off at Denny's for breakfast, and also where my other ride was going to meet us.

A good spot of over-priced breakfast and sub-par service came and went, along with some final bits of conversation, and after some farewells, Rob Snyder–my new ride, and one of the guys I'd be working with for the summer–and I bade Jack adieu, and we were off, riding the highway south to the Crowsnest Pass.

Of course, the journey didn't go without a couple highlights: we stopped off at Peter's Drive-in in Calgary for one of our last tastes of civilisation and something that anyone should do when passing by Calgary right at a mealtime. And the other thing: we took a wrong turn.

The Wrong Turn

It’s great travelling along a route that you only partially know and it's even more exciting when you make a mistake, which is what we did. As we were heading out of Calgary towards the Pass, we wanted to take the faster route–Highway 22–so we took the exit off of Highway 2 onto the 22X, like anyone normally would. As we were driving along the extension, we knew that we had to turn left sometime to hop onto the real 22 and drive along to our destination. Well, it turned out that we were a wee bit too anxious to get going south & we turned a turn too soon. Next thing we knew, we were driving down this unmaintained road with nothing but rolling amber foothills surrounding us, pocked every once in a while by these enormous, beautiful houses. We were sure that we had just–only seconds ago–left the outskirts of Alberta's largest city, but by the landscape surrounding us, you would never have been able to tell. It was a remarkable view: prairies stretching over the foothills as far as the eye could see, blockaded only by the ghostly shadows of the Rockies far to our right as our little 4x4 truck skipped along the road, puffing up a nice brown billow of dust behind us. Where were we? Some secondary highway–537 or something like that. Were we lost? Nope. Not a chance. This nifty little green and grey contraption in my hand told us exactly where we were & how to get to where we wanted to be: one simple right hand turn when this road ended & we'd be back on course. I love my wee GPS unit already.

The Pass

The Crowsnest Pass may be–by definition–the lowest part of the Continental Divide in the area, but it's still in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, and it's still over 1,000 feet above sea level higher than Edmonton. It being the end of April, one would expect the place to still have some decent snow coverage–or at least so I thought when I was packing for my 4-month excursion. However, when Rob & I arrived at camp & at the lake where the camp gets its name, there was no snow really to be seen at our elevation. Heck, the mountain lake–notorious for being frigid–was completely clear, thrashing about in the Pass' famous winds. Except for the lack of leaves, the place looked very much like it had in August last year. Who woulda thunk?

Rob & I drove up to the camp's office at walked in: only two people were around–quite uncommon. We were greeted heartily by Charles, the maintenance guy, who also showed us to our lodgings for the next 4 months. Rob & I unpacked, settled in a bit, had a small meal and turned in for the night.

Thursday.

Since the COLTS program didn't really start until the evening of the 28th, I had a lot of free time on my hands to play around with. Rob had come down early to get re-certified for First Aid, a requirement for the COLTS program. I slept in until 9–a wonderful change from the 4:30 mornings that I was getting used to because of work, and then just sort of wandered around for a bit. The Sysco truck, containing all of the foodstuffs for the camp's operations arrived, and I helped the camp directors receive the order, rotate stock & put things away. Wow, seems like work all over again :). Lunch came & went, where I met two more COLTS "students," Kayte & Ginny. Lunch being done, and some wood having been cut for that evening's sauna, Rob introduced me to a guy named Caleb, who wanted to take Rob's truck out for some 4x4ing. Having a couple of hours on our hands, we all decided to take the little truck out, up into the mountains.

4x4ing

With the three of us in a two-seater truck, we drove out towards the BC border, up onto a coal-mining road known around these parts as Tent Mountain Road. It's a pretty standard gravel road, well equipped with your run-of-the-mill huge potholes & the like. Nothing too serious, though. To make things more interesting, we decided to take the truck up what is supposed to be a quadding trail that leads to a camp site called "the bathtubs," due to the presence of some natural limestone bathtubs carved out by the mountain stream running there. Caleb–my new personal hero–decided that it would be much more interesting and much more comfortable to stand in the bed of the truck, holding on to the roll bars as we went down this trail. Driving a full-sized truck along that path was quite impressive, as there are parts of the path that are literally sections of the flowing creek. The best part, however, was this quite steep incline just past the bathtubs campsite. There was no way that we were going to pass this up. About two hundred feet up, the road forked, yielding one very steep path–literally 45 degrees of incline–and another, less steep approach to the top of the hill. Now, Rob has only had this truck for about a month, so he didn't want to try the super-steep incline right off the bat, or at least he didn't want to try climbing it right off the bat. So, instead, we took the less steep approach to the crest of this hill, turned around, and got ready for the decline of our lives.

This hill is like nothing you've ever gone down in a road vehicle before. I mean, think something like the first hill on a roller coaster track. Yes, that steep: not a word of a lie. The only reason we got up enough nerve to go down the bloody steep hill was because we saw what it looked like from the bottom. As we drove up the hill's edge, we slowly watched the ground disappear before our sight. There's something just a little bit scary–and exhilarating at the same time–about watching the horizon appear below the front of your vehicle. All that we could see out the windshield was blue and mountains: no ground at all. Seriously, it was like we were driving off the edge of a cliff. Then we started going down. The truck tipped forwards, gripping on to the loose boulders as best it could, which I must say, was quite amazingly done. We started crawling down the hill slowly to begin with... Until we got halfway down & the truck lost traction, siding its way along the path on a wave of loose rocks and boulders until we came to a pleasant rest at the bottom of the hill. What a rush!

Since we succeeded on descending the hill, we thought that we had might as well try going up the steep banshee. Turning the truck around on the path, we attempted the ascent. Attempt number one: we got 20 feet up, lost traction and started digging ruts in the loose soil. Attempt number two: taking a "running" start, we climber up twenty feet further than the time before, but again lost traction. Attempt number three: a racing start let the truck fly up the hill, but only a couple of feet farther that the previous time. As we sat there on the hill we looked out our windows at the trees beside us and laughed. Rob asked me, chuckling, "How steep do you think this hill is?" It was plain to see that we were in fact at a true 45° angle, since the trees were starting in the far bottom corner of the windows & were making a perfect diagonal line, cutting across the exterior view to the other side of the window.

Knowing that we couldn't get up the steep incline–at least at this point in the season, with the soil still quite moist and loose–we decided to drive around and come down one more time before heading back to camp. Just like the first time, the only comparison to that descent would be a roller coaster as we careened down the quad trail towards the bottom of the hill, riding along a cushion of rocks and boulders until stopping at the bottom of the hill.

That night, we had our screaming hot sauna, punctuated by watching the final periods of the Oilers' game & the Flames' game, both ending in disappointment.

What Next?

And now it's Friday. The whole show begins this evening. Should prove to be an interesting adventure, if these past couple days are any indication. Stay tuned for more updates to follow!