It was a beautiful Fall day in the Rockies today. My family and I were hiking up Marble Canyon in Kootenay Park, there was a bite in the air and the sky was that soft blue with the sun beaming in at a lower angle. We were hiking up thru the 2003 Kootenay burn, where thousands of trees were torched, their black, shiny remains towering above us.
We stopped by a mountain stream to have a snack and enjoy our surroundings. My son and nephew walked up the stream not far from where I was sitting, marvelling in the new ice that was forming at the waters edge. At the same time they both saw animal tracks in the ice, and asked me to come look at them. My partner in life also saw the tracks and thought they were cat like. As I got up from the log I was sitting on and moved towards the stream I stopped.........there below me, glistening in the sun atop a rock, was a paw print. After looking at it for a few moments I took a picture, and when we got home I compared the picture I took to an image in Ben Gadd's mountain journal. We had surprised a Lynx, a member of the cat family, who had probably stopped to get a drink out of the stream.
We are so fortunate to be a part of this environment and share it with so many creatures. As we were walking back down the valley heading home I stopped to reflect on where we were and what we had seen. As I looked up the mountain slopes I saw two mountain goats perched on a ridge high above the valley.
In a few months we will be skiing up this valley and it will be great to experience all the adventure the mountains bring to our world.
