polycon express 2

[Downtown Edmonton through the trees]Over the river and through the trees downtown Edmonton could be seen from the south bank of the river in Old Strathcona near End of Steel Park, where the CP line from Calgary ends. Edmonton is the northernmost major city in North America; from here it's more than three hundred miles to the United States border. The city was remarkably green (partly due to an abnormally wet summer, I was told, and partly because it includes an unusually large amount of park land). Jennie, the organizer of our conference, invited several of us for a very enjoyable walk through a ravine in a nearby park.

Old Strathcona is a very pleasant neighborhood; its houses reminded me a bit of Berkeley, California, while the intense summer sun brought back memories of a trip to Albuquerque last fall. Like that city far to south Edmonton has a distinctly western feel. The summer days are very long; I saw the sun go down at 10:30 in the evening and it got dark at eleven o'clock. I dare not imagine how short the day must be in January, when I'm told it can get as cold as forty degrees below zero. The weather was hot and sunny during my stay, and the sun seemed much stronger here than at home (perhaps because Edmonton's air is so much cleaner than Boston's).

[South Park!] Imagine my surprise on opening the curtains in my room at the Varscona Hotel to find this establishment directly across the street! There's no way I could let this go without snapping a picture. The street in the foreground is Whyte (or 82nd) Avenue, the main street of Old Strathcona. I'm told the car dealership predates the South Park television show. There was at least one other car dealership in the area; the neon sign on its roof alternately flashed "CHEVROLET" and "OLDSMOBILE" all night long.

Our conference, alt.polycon 6, took place for three days at the Varscona. It consisted of a series of discussion sessions held in the hotel's function rooms and a "decadent Sunday brunch". We talked about many of the same things that crop up in our discussions on the newsgroup and I enjoyed the opportunity to converse in person with people I know primarily from the Internet whom I rarely see in person. Saturday evening we split up in groups of eight to ten people and went to dinner at one of the local restaurants; as Alberta is famous for its beef, I chose the steak house and enjoyed some of the best beef I've ever tasted.

I heard a National Public Radio program recently describing the Greenwich Village phenomenon of the 1910's: a community of artists, writers, political and social radicals, feminists, rebels against Victorian moralism. The longer I listened to Christopher Lydon and his guest the more I recognized in our newsgroup something very much like what they were discussing. Are we the new Bohemians?

[A river west of Edmonton] West of Edmonton the country looked much like this. One family attending the conference had been hiking in the mountains of western Alberta earlier in the week; another group had taken the train to Vancouver, which was my next destination, and back. I was looking forward to seeing this part of my route, and on the Monday following the end of the conference I found myself at the Edmonton station once again to board the westbound Canadian. I wish I could have stayed long enough to accept Jennie's invitation to Monday morning brunch, though.

[A train yard in western Alberta] Yellow flowers dot a remote yard in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. If memory serves me right this is Hinton, Alberta, the last stop before Jasper. The station is some fifteen cars ahead and on the other side of the train, so I was not able to photograph it. Unlike Amtrak, which makes loud (but sometimes distorted and unintelligible) announcements before every stop, often followed by "all doors will not open at [name of station]", the VIA people didn't generally announce stops at all, but the car hosts did come by to help passengers leaving the train.

[Mountains] The Canadian Rockies rise above the pine forests of western Alberta. Compared to the Rockies south of the border, there seemed to be much more water here. Some of the mountains we passed were high enough that snow could be seen on their peaks even in high summer. Despite day after day of warm sunshine I wondered what keeps these valleys so green if not frequent rains. There was nary a sign of civilization here except for the railroad; the climate must therefore, I gathered, be pretty harsh, as pleasant as it seemed at the time.

[More mountains and trees] Look carefully and you might be able to make out some snow on the mountain peak behind the clump of trees to the right. Jennie, the conference chairperson, had told me that despite its extremely cold winters Edmonton gets so little snow that residents sweep rather than shovel it from their driveways. Here, however, I suspected there is probably a great deal more. This was still Alberta; we were following a river that flows eastwards. When I saw water flowing westwards, I knew I had crossed the continental divide into British Columbia.

[Jasper, Alberta] This is Jasper, Alberta. Fenced off in the foreground is Canadian National Railways 4-8-2 No. 6015; it was built by the Canadian Locomotive Company in 1923 for express passenger service between Montreal and Toronto and is one of five surviving Canadian National Mountain-type locomotives. Heaven only knew what forty years exposed to the elements had done to it, but superficially it looked to be in pretty good shape. Although you can't seem them in the picture, there were small patches of snow on the mountain in the background.

[More mountains] Today was July 31, but on Robson Peak in eastern British Columbia it was still winter. I read somewhere that ground temperatures typically lag the position of the sun in the sky by about a month, so late July is nominally the warmest time of the year. I'm guessing this was probably as far as the snow ever retreats up here. There are actual glaciers in these mountains; the family at my conference that had been hiking in the mountains earlier in the week had actually walked on one.

[More mountains] One problem with trains is that they can't climb mountains. They must either turn aside and go around the mountains, as this picture shows, or they must tunnel under them. My train passed through several tunnels during its run through the Rockies, and two of the tunnels took several minutes to traverse. Unfortunately, the scenery inside the tunnels left a great deal to be desired, and sometimes the train approached a particularly spectacular scene, as here, only to curve away too soon.

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