Road trip for the Victoria Day long weekend...

We headed out from Cochrane in Alberta to Kimberley in the south west corner of British Columbia. As the crow flies, it should be fairly quick journey, but those big mountains get in the way, so we had to put up with a four-hour drive along some of the most beautiful highways ever. It's a tough life.

The devastation caused by the dreaded pine-beetle runs for miles and miles and is a very sobering sight.

The whole eco-system must be changing as some animals and insects move to a new neighbourhood, and yet other creatures move in to the decaying and changing forests. Maybe it's an up and coming area for some kinds of insect yuppies?!

But it's good to see the little saplings making a bid for freedom - I wonder how many decades this will take to fix? Nature is great at sorting itself out, but it will take years for these dead tree carcasses to fall and rot down and feed the ground again.

We pass some mini hoodoos on the way down Highway 93.

Fantastic ripples in the rock.

We were staying with some friends who have bought a townhouse up by the ski hills of Kimberley.

Welcome to Germany!

Kimberley is a old mining town that decided, like many small towns, that it needed to re-invent itself to avoid closure and rot. Ski-hills and associated facilities were re-vamped, the old mines and railway are now a tourist attraction and the town decided to re-launch itself on a Bavarian theme. I don't really know why, but a town offering bratwurst and schnitzel in the shadows of the Canadian Rockies certainly offers a new theme!

And the nature ain't bad either ...

In fact, I was determined to hunt out some wild-life. I need moose to complete my photo album you see. Any moose out there?

Well, no - lots of deer - more than I have ever seen actually - absolutely everywhere.

A bad, blurry picture of a large heron-type fella - don't ask me for species.

And a cute picture of a fluffy squirrel - probably not that unusual really, but he's not quite grey, and he's certainly not black - not like the squirrels I am used to seeing around my way these days.

And my piece de resistance .....

My first black bear !

Again - slightly blurry photos, but one doesn't walk up close to these beautiful creatures and disturb them from their current meal, for fear of presenting oneself as dessert.

Glacier National Park, Montana

Here are just a few photos of one part of our recent holiday. We followed the tourist trail along Going-to-the-Sun Road within Glacier National Park which is in northern Montana bordering British Columbia and Alberta. And tourist trap or not, it is well worth a visit if you are anywhere near the area but bear in mind that due to altitude and snow, it is only open for a few months during the summer each year. It's a pretty, twisting, sometimes narrow rising route that climbs to approximately 6400 feet above sea level at Logan's Pass. The views in all directions are stunning. The vegetation and wild-flowers will have me Googling for weeks.

The route bans long or high vehicles and I would suggest that nervous drivers need not apply - there are little red 'buses' that will pick up and drop off passengers anywhere along the road if you need to leave your 35 foot camping trailer behind in the car park.

I think the motorcyclists were having the best experience and views as they were weaving back and forth across both lanes to get a better look at the scenery and the American guys were not wearing crash helmets either which must add to that sense of freedom-wind-in-my-hair moments (right up the point they fall off and crack their skulls open - c'mon guys, even when it's not the law ....).

I was saddened to see yet another example of the devastation caused by the pine beetle that has been moving across many western states of the US and has been silently attacking millions of hectares of the landscape in British Columbia and Alberta amongst many other areas.

I guess nature will sort itself out at some point, but not in my time...

There are still little pockets of snow to be seen across the mountain sides and a couple of mini-glaciers left at the road sides, which people were sliding down, my kids included, which was all just a tad weird bearing in mind it was a toasty 32 degrees outside.