Fall Visit to Vancouver, BC

We spent a while in front of "Gone Green," by Lawrence Paul Yuxwelupton, of Coast Salish and Okanagan descent, at UBC's Museum of Anthropology on a rainy day when were happy to be inside this beautiful museum that focuses on British Columbia's First Nations. 

Yuxwelupton's painting looks at trees from inside the trees' green world and brings to it the ovoids of many Pacific Northwest cultures' art; he brings together people, the green world, and water in the ovoid motif that seems to represent light reflecting off still water.  People, the green world, water--that's Vancouver--, and we loved it. 

  

 










Along with UBC's MOA, another favorite part of Vancouver for us was the VanDusen Botanical Gardens.  We took a docent tour and then wandered across lawns and around trees on our own. 




 










 



 
Our friendly,  ivy-covered hotel, built in 1912, gave us views of English Bay right out the door.



 

Vancouver Public Library

Staying on English Bay also gave us a good 40-minute walk each way to downtown, which we used to explore different streets every day.  What a city, with chairs and plantings along sidewalks and a number of buildings with rooftop trees.  I had thought I'd need to go walking in Stanley Park to escape the city; I didn't. We had a great time.

A Beautiful Day for Sweeping Chokecherries and Biking

It's amazing how close to home (and without even a real event) you can have adventure.  It was a day in the 70s among hot ones, so we biked down Lincoln Hills and up Rattlesnake Drive, where a doe and fawn ran across the road in front of us and a car passing us.  The driver didn't slow at all so maybe didn't see how near the car came to hitting the fawn, but I know how close I came to rear-ending Eric who saw the imminence and suddenly stopped.  We both stood a while beside the road looking at nothing--since nothing had happened--and starting to breathe. 

The Golden Spike for the Bitterroot Trail

 





The missing Missoula-to-Lolo segment of the 50-mile Missoula-to-Hamilton Bitterroot Trail opened yesterday.  








 

 
While the path runs disconcertingly close to zooming cars on highway 93, and the noise of those cars drowns out cyclists' conversation, at least bikes now have some of their own space on this dangerous stretch.  

















And the valley is worth experiencing at 10 miles per hour.  










We joined hundreds of riders grinning their way from Silver Park in Missoula to Travelers' Rest State Park for a ribbon cutting ceremony.  I have never seen so many bikes in one place.

Some of the speakers were those who worked hard for decades to make this trail possible, and

Tony Incashola blessed the old place and new trail in Salish and commemorated the day as the anniversary of the unfortunate 1855 Hellgate Treaty that led to the 1859 removal of the Salish from their home in the Bitterroot Valley. 

 

A charming part of the celebration was the chorus from Toronto in town for the International Choral Festival that not only sang before the speeches but also stood at the balloon gate and sang the riders north afterward.  

Heading north, the first riders, with cardboard horse heads on their bikes, represented Corps of Discovery members who camped at Travelers' Rest in 1805 and 1806.  Right behind them rode bikers from the 1976 Transcontinental Bikecentennial, gathered for a 40th anniversary reunion.  







We followed, cheered by some very fresh pavement and the community of bike shorts, fraternité, egalité, liberté, and joie de vivre.

Ketchum, Idaho

Approaching Ketchum from the South

We toodled around on our bikes on the Wood River Trail System over two beautiful days this week; the paved paths connect Bellevue (elevation 5200') and Ketchum (elevation 6000') with a 15-mile, north-south, rail-to-trail run paralleling highway 75.  They also go two miles farther up the Wood River beyond Ketchum and branch east and west from Ketchum: west beside Warm Springs Road, east on the 6-mile Elkhorn/Sun Valley loop, and a ways farther east past Sun Valley beside Trail Creek Road. 

Ritzau Park, between Hailey and Ketchum

The Wood River stretch has plentiful benches and some water fountains, restrooms, shady sections, and river access points.

Between the Golf Course and Elkhorn Road

The Elkhorn/Sun Valley Loop winds through neighborhoods and golf courses. 

The beautiful Hemingway Memorial is just off the Trail Creek Road path.   Above the East Fork valley, its column stands with a sculpted head of Hemingway and a plaque with words excerpted and edited from a eulogy he gave in 1939 for a friend in Ketchum:

 


"Best of all he loved the fall 
the leaves yellow on the cottonwoods
leaves floating on the trout streams
and above the hills
     the high blue windless skies.
Now he will be a part of them forever."
     Ernest Hemingway --  Idaho -- 1939

 

Behold!

At Galena Summit (9000') on the way home, we  stopped for a short hike on the Titus Lake trail--quintessentially Sawtoothy with its balsamroot, paintbrush, forget-me-nots, little creeks to hop over, and snow patches to cross.

Chronos and Kairos

Blue sky, warm air, and a ride into town.  As with some years' early weeks of winter when cold and snow feel novel and wonderful, this summer's slow arrival makes a day like today especially bright--no smoke yet, the grass still green, the warmth just warmth and not scorch.  As my bike bottle reminds me in words around the top: never a bad day to bike.  This is really not, not, not a bad day to bike.  We head out to visit some sculptures we like.   

 












The Magnificent Tree of the Arts, by Tom Rippon, 1996, on the east wall of the Performing Arts, Radio, and TV Building at UM, is made of about a thousand pieces of porcelain, many representing paintbrushes, trumpets, and glissando symbols, or maybe those wavelets are wavy brush strokes.   
 
Flight Column, by Robert J. Gehrke, 1996, made of Cor-Ten Steel, 24' x 3' x 1 3/4" stands on the sidewalk near the business building and across from the music building on the UM campus.  The column is almost invisible on edge, but even looking at it straight on is looking through it; the figures of birds are made of sky.  And they are particular, recognizable kinds of birds: bald eagles, 3 kinds of swallows, hawks and nighthawks, crows, peregrine falcons, pigeons, meadowlarks, and a kingfisher.  

Perseverance and Passage, by George Ybarra, 2015, also made of Cor-Ten steel, leans and trudges forward in Silver Park, near the Clark Fork River and bike path.  It commemorates the steadfast people who have lived here over time, the travelers who have made their way along the river, and the industrial mill workers who made their living on this site that has been reclaimed as a park.

James Parker was reviewing a poetry book and describing what poetry does in the May 2016 Atlantic, but he could have been writing about experiencing music, birds, sky, or Cor-Ten steel when he contrasted ordinary days with extraordinary moments: "Existence heaps itself upon you; your tongue thickens and your thoughts get cluttered.  But you keep a muddy eye trained on the world's poetry portals, the places where the poems come flapping through, because you know that a line, a rhyme, a verb can reboot your internal chitchat and zap you out of all your encrustations.  You know that this is the poet's job, in the end: to remind you--oh, the cheesiness, but oh, the urgency--how to be alive."

 

Super North Peak Superbloom

“Fear no more the heat o’ the sun.
Nor the furious winter’s rages,
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”
       Cymbeline, Act IV, Scene 2, lines 258-263



The balsamroot golden lads have come to dust, but their leaves shelter Indian paintbrush on the North Peak.

Clouds, flowers, grass flew around in the wind, 

but it was a good day for soft light in sheltered spots!

shaggy fleabane, Erigeron pumilus

blanketflower, Gaillardia aristata

bitterroot, Lewisia rediviva

threadleaf phacelia, Phacelia linearis

lupine and yarrow

larkspur

golden aster, Chrysopsis villosa

Super Jumbo Superbloom

Cushion Buckwheat, Eriogonum ovalifolium

Lupine, Lupinus

Death Camas, Zigadenus venenosus, and Prairie Smoke, Geum triflorum

Death Camas

Prairie Smoke

Summit garden, Sin Min Koos (Salish), Mt. Jumbo

Bitterroot, Lewisia rediviva

Fuzzytongue Penstemon, Penstemon eriantherus

Prairie Smoke