murraysovereign

There's a Youth Hostel shuttle that runs up and down the Icefields Parkway to serve the hostels along the way, but they can probably drop you anywhere you ask. Not sure about pickup on your return. Brewster bus lines, maybe Greyhound although they've been cutting service all over the place the past few years. Contact Num-Ti-Jah Lodge at Bow Lake, they'll probably have a list of transportation options.

I've been catching up, after too many years with limited time available for reading. Three Day Road was my second Joseph Boyden novel this year, after The Orenda, in which a Jesuit priest... ummmm... spends time among the Huron, developing an appreciation for their culture. Grim reading, in some ways harder going than Three Day Road. I have a third Boyden on the shelf - Into Black Spruce - but frankly I'm afraid to start just yet so I've taken to lighter fare in the interim. Currently reading The Map That Changed The World by Simon Winchester, about the canal-builder in early 19th-century England who basically invented modern geology. Prior to that was Endurance by Alfred Lansing, about the Shackleton expedition. Also Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy by Pietra Rivoli, which is pretty much what it sounds like, examining global trade patterns and economic impacts of same by tracing a t-shirt from its very beginning to its end. Tzeporah Berman's This Crazy Time is about her role in BC's "War in the Woods" of the 1980s and 90s, and her evolution from hard-line absolutist to pragmatic negotiator. Chasing the Phantom is by a friend of mine, Ed Fischer, principally about his multi-year quest to observe snow leopards in their natural habitat, but encompassing many more aspects of Ed's world view and the past experiences that brought him to his present place. And last but not least, having already read The Guns of August a couple of years ago, my main nod to the centenary of the Great War has been to read Tim Cook's history of the Canadian Corps. At The Sharp End covers the first half of the war, from the initial mobilization of reservists and the call for volunteers that made up the First Contingent, their first major combat experience including the first German deployment of gas on the Western Front and the battles for Kitchener's Wood at 2nd Ypres, through to Thiepval Ridge, Regina Trench and Courcelette at the Battle of the Somme. Unbelievable - simply unbelievable. I can't begin to fathom how men could endure, much less excel, in such conditions. The second volume is next on my list, so first up for 2015 - Shock Troops follows the Corps from the spring of 1917 through to the conclusion of their war at Mons, so covering Vimy Ridge, Passchendale, Lens, Amiens and the 100 Days.

Cam Lube is made for Metolius by White Lightning - says it right on the label. Is it the same stuff you use on bikes, or a different formula, I don't know, but similar enough I'd bet.

Unless you're into that sort of thing, of course.

I meant to measure the cables when we paddled down the river last fall, but neglected to take any sort of measuring device with me, so it's still on the "to-do" list. The top cable that carries the warning cones is pretty light, so I expect any decent-opening 'biner would fit. The bottom cable is more robust, as it carries the load of the cable-car, and maybe closer to 1". When passing the cones, I would suggest first giving each one a good "whack" and then backing off a few paces - people have found wasp nests in those things in the past, and you don't want to be clipped on both sides of the cone, fumbling around trying to unclip one of your leashes while the entire nest empties out in your face.

Don't forget A-holes. Also not endangered (apparently): people who get suckered by Onion-like fake news sites. "This is That - we don't just discuss the issues: we fabricate them."

Up here, the Harper government made a big public deal of doing exactly the same thing, targeting any organization with a green/environmental component to their activities and singling them out for "special treatment" from the taxation agencies with an eye to stripping them of whatever tax status they may have enjoyed. Our conservatives were strangely silent on that one (actually they weren't - they were opening supportive), but they're gleefully bashing Obama all over the place over this IRS business. Transnational hypocrisy?

I would think a thin coating of urethane such as Seamsure, ShoeGoo, any of those ought to work. Zero breathability, but pretty good waterproofing. It may crack along the seams over time and need to be touched up, but it should do an OK job.

My brother had an opposite experience: his beater little pickup truck was stolen, and by the time the police recovered it about a year later the thieves had totally pimped it - new engine, new paint, new sound system, upholstery, tires, exhaust, ... the works. The truck he got back was worth many many times more than the one that was stolen so he sold it, bought another beater, and banked the difference. So sometimes the thieves get screwed in the end - it's all too rare, but it does happen. And if I find out there isn't a special place in Hell for bicycle thieves, I'm gonna be pissed.

Reading the on-line comments that follow news stories about the bombing, it's depressing to see how frequently terms like "Mossad" and "False Flag" show up. The "conspiracy-under-every-bed" crowd are already crawling all over this like maggots.

Careful - you're getting off script. Remember, the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a bomb is a good guy with a bomb.

They actually only scrapped registration of long-guns, and it was scrapped after the conservative party gained a majority. Sound familiar? Or was it found to be completely ineffective, costly, unenforceable and a thorn in the side for law abiding citizens? It was scrapped because Stephen Harper is a blatant opportunist whose only guiding principle is that of political expediency. He'd spent the preceding few years whipping the "red meat" wing of the conservative party into a delirious frenzy over the long-gun registry in order to earn their votes and, when it worked, he was too scared shitless to deny them their happy ending. That's why it was scrapped - to pay for the votes of a relative handful of rural voters, pure and simple. If you want to have a discussion based on facts and data and objective analysis, then Stephen Harper is most assuredly not the guy you want to point in support of your argument, or any argument, for that matter. Stephen Harper despises facts, data, and objective analysis. In fact he despises anything that isn't Stephen Harper, which means he even despises you, despite having never met or even heard of you.

Mexicans are comparatively scarce around here. Chinese coal miners are a dime a dozen lately, but they're all too far north to be any use packing bud across the border.

Well, sure, recreationally you can carry as much as you want. But this guy was working, and under Worker's Compensation rules 60 lbs is the maximum allowable load for one person. Remember, we're a law-abiding bunch up here

In my experience that applies to lakes with shallows around the edges, and particularly during warming spells as the shallow water warms much faster than the deeper main body of water. Garibaldi Lake is pretty steep sided, with not much shallow water anywhere except right at the south end and immediately in front of the Battleship Island campground. I would guess it will start freezing from the edges, and the ice will gradually spread until the centre of the lake freezes over last, so that early season the ice will probably be thicker around the perimeter. That said, every lake will be unique depending on currents and such, and no matter where you are the first few feet away from land should always be viewed with a degree of suspicion. Be cautious, and have a plan "B". I got an auto-reply from my main BC Parks contact saying she's away until mid-January, so I'll have to try contacting someone else. Stay tuned...

A pilot friend of mine tells me the lake has been frozen for a while now, but he can't vouch for how thick the ice is. He hasn't seen any sign of tracks on the Neve yet so no evidence of people crossing the lake either. But if you stay close to shoreline it's probably(?) passable, and may be firming up further from shore also. It's been cold enough lately the daytime thawing will have been pretty minimal. I'll try to track down someone from BC Parks to see if they have any word, but they can be pretty scarce during the winter months as they get cut back to skeleton stffing levels.

I think you're probably right. Any gun-control law in Canada probably has a close equivalent in the US. But in the US it seems that most gun control laws also include loopholes almost big enough to drive an Abrams tank through. That's possibly the single biggest difference - we don't have loopholes everywhere, so gun owners have to deal with the laws as they were written. And waiting periods - we have those, too. I don't know how long they are, but more than 48 or 72 hours - more in the range of a few weeks for handguns I think. But the end result in terms of gun ownership isn't that huge. The last numbers I saw indicated the percentage of the population who own guns in Canada is about 1/3 that of the US. I suspect the average number of guns owned per gun owner is lower in Canada, but I also wouldn't be surprised if that assumption is totally wrong. When he was making Bowling For Columbine, Michael Moore originally came north to show an example of a country very similar to the US but without all the guns. When he got here he was surprised to find the stats on gun ownership were far different from what he expected. "There are more guns in Canada than there are hockey sticks" was his quip, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was actually true. The biggest difference is that we just use them on one another far less frequently, and I've never heard a convincing explanation as to why that should be. I keep coming back to the idea that if it's easier for the average person to get hold of a gun, then it's also going to be easier for the nutcase to get hold of one, simply because there's so many more of the things floating around. And when nutcases can easily get their hands on guns, lots of people are probably going to die.

We watch the same movies in Canada, we watch the same TV shows in Canada, we play the same video games in Canada. Hell, a sizeable proportion of those movies and TV shows and video games are written and/or produced by Canadians, in Canada. And yet, despite spending our entire lives wallowing in exactly the same "culture" as our American brethren, we're no-where near as likely to kill one another. Guns, knives, baseball bats, hockey sticks, you name it, we just don't take up weapons against one another with anything approaching the enthusiasm of Americans. If the popular culture is responsible for the mayhem, then why isn't the mayhem rate just as high on this side of the border as on your side? Clearly there's something else going on: the "guns don't kill people - video games kill people" argument is BS.

No mention of how to pay for keeping a couple of armed guards on duty in every school in the country - how many billions a year is that going to cost? But he clearly told congress to "appropriate whatever means" to make it happen. So, how would the NRA feel about a sales tax on ammunition - say $1 or $2 per bullet, in order to pay for this plan? Surely they couldn't object to that? After all, he clearly stated "it is now time for us to assume responsibility for their safety at school." I say call him on it.

Interesting, if you scroll down that list and check the stats on "Grenade Amok" killing sprees, the United States doesn't appear on the list anywhere. Not once. It's almost as if there's some sort of link between availability of grenades, and grenades being used to kill people. Or maybe it just indicates that if those countries on the list had more liberal grenade-ownership laws, they'd have fewer grenade killings. Yeah - that's probably it: more grenades would make those countries safer.

So, gun control (disallowing the mentally ill from obtaining them) helps how here exactly? If it was more difficult for Mrs Lanza to legally acquire all those guns, maybe she wouldn't have had them (I've heard nothing to suggest that she wasn't law-abiding). If she hadn't had them, he wouldn't have been able to take them all from her cold, dead hands. If he hadn't been able to take all those guns from his mother's cold, dead hands, there wouldn't have been 26 more sets of cold, dead hands before morning recess.

Lewis Carroll would absolutely LOVE what you've done with the rabbit hole. Seriously.

A little too graphic for my tastes. "They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them." Short, simple, and poignant.

Poppies are still widely used - UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand... there's nothing stopping you Yanks from doing the same. Has the US never used the poppy as a symbol of remembrance, or was it dropped at some point?

...love that Canadian flag in the distance. Nice touch. Looks kinda Mexican to me