Fading light illuminates the beauty of a new winter
I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the onset of winter in Alberta.
There is a certain smell in the air that signals winter's imminent arrival, carried in by the kind of brisk, chill wind that means there will be frost sparkling on the windows in the morning. This heady scent is a magnet on a brilliantly sunny weekend afternoon, urging me to get outside for a walk before there's snow on the ground.
The "hate" part is mostly about the darkness, which always takes a bit of an adjustment and a whole lot of cheerfully burning candles in my house. When the temperature dips below, say, minus 10 C, I convince my husband to build a fire. These nights, you can find the cat and I curled up in front of it, me reading a book, the cat stretching his ample girth as close to the grate as he can without getting burned.
We change our clocks back to Standard Time this coming weekend, which signals the beginning of the time of year that takes the most adjustment of all. It means we get a bit more light in the mornings again, but then darkness descends on the valley almost as soon as the workday is over. Moving in the direction of the Winter Solstice, with darker mornings and the first serious snowfalls in the valley, I cling to the happiness and busy-ness of Christmas preparations to get me through.
Longtime Canmore folk will tell you the first snow of the year is bound to come before Halloween on Oct. 31. My colleague Jennifer likes to keep our office abreast of first snowfall statistics. This year's first appearance of the white stuff was on Oct. 13, while last year had snow a few days later, on Oct. 16. In 2003, we closed in on that Halloween deadline, with the first snowfall on Oct. 29. While we all like to make note of this seasonal harbinger, the important thing to note is that early snow doesn't tend to stick around in the valley. Chinook winds blow through, the temperatures climb into the high teens, and we're back to a brown and gold landscape with the odd tuft of hardy greenery hanging on for dear life.
Visitors to Canmore have an even greater shock, I would imagine, at the darkness they find so early in evenings. Many visitors come from latitudes much further south, which aren't affected so much by shrinking daylight. Canmore is hardly the North Pole, but it must feel that way sometimes to our guests at this time of year.
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The "love" bit for me is actually very much tied up in these same aspects of light and dark. Once I've grown used to the shortening days, I begin to appreciate the beauty of winter nights. I love to watch the snow dancing in pools of light cast by streetlights, and, even more, the sky filled with stars that reflect off mountains in their new coats of snow.
Light becomes precious for a couple of months for those who live here full time. You wouldn't want to miss an opportunity to get outside, go skiing either at a downhill resort or on the beautiful trails at the Canmore Nordic Centre. We like to take a drive into Kananaskis Country and walk on the huge, frozen Spray Lake. Dogsled teams can be seen in the distance, ice fishers chat as they wait for a bite, and sunlight reflecting off the huge, snow-covered lake surface is almost blinding.
The point between light and darkness, and all that is good about both, is rather defining for Canmore people, and something that can certainly be appreciated by our visitors.
- Shari Bishop Bowes, Editor, SolaraLife
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