All this tour, I’ve been watching the mountains waaaaaay in the background – barely there silhouettes and often invisible – but now I’m driving towards them… and they’re getting bigger.

They resolve into waves of blue misty watercolour cutout mountains – beautiful... I get distracted by the giant wind farms out here – I was told there’d be a lot of them but… THIS is a LOT of them! Holy! They’re everywhere and seemingly random groupings. I stick my camera out the window and try to get pictures while not dropping my camera and not driving into oncoming traffic.

And suddenly, while I was looking at giant fans, the mountain silhouettes turn into actual mountains with trees and snow and avalanche signs. They’re stunning – particularly after over a week of prairies.

I make a couple phone calls at Beaver Mines, the last spot for cell signal (Gerry, my host, says “watch out for moose” and then head into the wilderness of Castle Valley. Cruising along a gravel road, I kick up a ton of dust behind me. After about fifteen minutes, I spot a truck coming my way, kicking up even more dust behind it. We cross and for a second I’m lost in a sandstorm – I brake, slowing down – and thank god – a second later a deer dashes right in front of me across the road.

I drive much slower into the Castle Mountain ski resort and am welcomed by Gerry, who’s driven down to meet me on his quad with his 2 golden retrievers, Zella and Zuzu. Zuzu has brought a stuffed bear with her. We drive up the hill a bit to Gerry & Lynn’s place –a beautiful ski resort lodgy place with excellent warpy wood banisters (I find out later that Gerry builds these).

Gerry & Lynn are boisterous, friendly folks – they live up here with their pups year round and they’ve been doing house concerts for years now. Good people. We eat dinner and they tell me a bit about Castle Mountain – apparently one of the best skiing areas around (hey Ferney folks – these Castle Mountain people are dissing your black diamonds). Gerry is also a cancer survivor and Lynn controls her arthritis – both pretty amazingly tough, they’re unfortunately moving out of the resort soon, selling their beautiful place. Gerry explains that after a while you just need a change...

Zella, who likes getting her belly rubbed, is apparently the matriarch of the mountain – the alpha dog of, not only all the dogs in the resort, but also the bears, cougars, coyotes, etc. She’s an 11 year old dog, but still runs around like crazy – she’ll round up a pack to bark off a bear, or fight a cougar herself. Zuzu on the other hand is only 2, still carries her bear around, and is still learning how to fight cougars… they both like dog treats and getting their bellies rubbed.

I’ve heard all along that the Castle Mountain shows are a bit of a party and this one proves no different. Even though it’s a Monday night we get a pretty good crowd – and a quite eclectic one. There’s an older crowd who seems to want a nice night of music, a younger crowd, made up of local working crews, who seem to want a big party, and Gerry’s practically a crowd in himself – he likes to shout out jokes and banter with me – he’s hilarious. It occasionally feels like I’m playing three shows, one for each crowd. But surprisingly everyone enjoys themselves. By the end, Dear Aunty Emm somehow devolves into an improv song called “I hate farms” – dedicated to another Jerry, who owns one of the biggest potato farms in North America – nearby in Lethbridge. He’s apparently responsible for McCain’s French fries.

The young crowd is part of a local “Fire Safe” crew – they’re contracted to fly around in helicopters to forest areas where the trees are overgrown and to remove the brush below the trees, the dead trees, and basically anything overly flammable – they hack their way through these areas and then burn their piles up – working about 12 hours a day, it sounds like hard work, but pretty rewarding – especially since they may be responsible for stopping some of the major forest firest out here.

Outside there are 10 million stars in the sky. Gerry tells me that this is nothing – up on the hill you see even more.

After the show, I hang out with Gerry & Lynn, who tell me countless Zella stories, bear stories, wolf stories, coyote stories – basically letting me know how close I am to dying out here – and then wish me a good night.

The next morning, Gerry takes me out on the quad, with the dogs running ahead – we driving around and I learn about packrat tracks (apparently packrats are real – they like to collect shiny object like pop can tabs, and they also smell horrific), snowflake rocks (dark stones flecked with white volcanic rocks), as well as valley politics, poachers, mountain men, and a million other things. At one point, Gerry says, “well, we’ve gone up about 800 feet, we should turn around to get you off in time.” 800 FEET? Apparently all the roads just slowly wind up the mountain and we’ve been going up the entire time. We stop by some creeks and the dogs go swimming in the sub-zero water, crashing through the ice happily.

We get back and I pack up – heading back into Calgary, I can’t think of a bigger difference from this land of stars, bears, and mountains.