Hitting the dusty trail

The main selling point for my boys about moving to Yellowknife was that we would be near a dear friend of mine Jay. Jay has been a part of our family since I worked with him on a project called Canada@150, almost nine years ago. It is perhaps therefore destined that we would find ourselves in the same city for Canada’s 150^th birthday.

Jay and the boys on the Ingraham Trail

Jay has a job where he travels a great deal, so he was farther north when we arrived. But once back everyone was eager to get together. Living in a hotel makes it somewhat hard to host, so we opted for a driving tour of the city and then headed out to the Ingraham Trail. The Ingraham trail is a beautiful road through the rugged landscape of the Northwest Territories. Rock cuts go from shades of pink to almost charcoal black and always marbled with quartz.

While climbing up hills the boys and Brent found beautiful pieces of stone, which they began collecting, much to my dismay. I am not a fan of useless objects, but some in our family love collecting. I wanted to put an early stop to the notion that their might be a rock collection forming. Unfortunately, I am the slowest climber, both because I injured my leg ago and because I happened to be wearing a boot with heels. So I while I thought I had convinced everyone to leave nature where we found it; when we got back to the hotel rocks seem to appear from every pocket imaginable. Brent being helpful, offered up that we could have a rock garden or build a rock wall at the condo we will be moving into. I was not amused.

I guess the good news is we probably only have a month or so before the snow/darkness comes, making rock finding a much more challenging prospective. However, the land is so beautiful it is hard not to want to go rambling over the Canadian shield. I have the strong sense we will be welcoming more rocks into our house over the coming month, but more importantly we will get to welcome old friends and new ones too.

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