A home for a dream --- winter wonderland
Snow is one of my favourites. In most of the literature and articles snow is the symbol of purity, beauty, grace, gentleness, etc. In agriculture, heavy snow implies a prosperous year coming on its way. Most popular in fairy tales, we grew up with the story of Snow White. Instinctively snow in my mind represents Beauty and Love. After we moved to Canada, though it is cold, but it did not prevent me from loving winter and snow. As we were living in prairie, it was very tempting to know how the forest would look like after a heavy snowfall.
Finally, on the second day of 2022 after a heavy snow fall, we decided to hike a trail to inkpots in Johnson Canyon. We had hiked Johnson canyon several times, but not at winter times, especially after a snow fall. I knew there are 2 destinations: lower fall and upper falls, and hikers usually stop and upper fall. Actually, there is one more destination, the inkpots, which located 3.5 Km further from upper fall. My destination is inkpots, which is about 12 Km round trip.
After the first step on the trail, I had a sense of delight in my heart. The trees, rocks, creek , steps and rails were all decorated fluffy white. It was quiet, only the crunchy sounds from foot steps. There was no wind at all, a world of calmness and silentness.
There were fairly amount of hikers,but the trail is not crowd at all. The trail was covered with snowy, but not icy or slippery. The trail was quite wide to upper fall as more visitors were here. It did not take us to long to reach the upper fall. There was several ice climbers hanging on the ice cliff.
The trail became narrow and snow became deeper too after we passed the upper fall. It is obvious less people were traveling here. Compared to the scenery before upper fall, the view after upper fall was more attractive. The big piles on puffy snow on tree branch could mimic anything you can image, all the figures in fairy tale could be found here. It is absolutely a breathtaking winter wonderland, a world of imagination. Walking in such a trail surrounded by all the snowy fairytale figures with your loved one would made you feel drenched in happiness, a real peaceful joy, a silent world only for you and your love. My dream lives here , and will live here forever.
Hiking in winter is different to summer hiking. Every step took effort, especially at places with deep snow. I was puffing very hard, heart pounding, legs hurt. In contrast to the cold figer tips and toes at the beginning, now I felt the whole body was warm. There was one time, a big chunk of ice fell from the tree top and turned me into a snow-stature. I am so lucky that there is no spell on me in this wonderland . Otherwise, there would never be such a posting from me. It was after this accident the idea of making a symbolic thing for MYSJ popped out, and so I wrote with my hiking stick "MYSJ 2022" on the hillside near inkpots.
There are 5 ink pots at the end of the trail. Each pot has a different colour. However I did not see a rich colour in the water, perhaps due to less spring water flowing out from the bottom of the pots. I will come back to visit this wonderland again in the summer to see if I could fill a bottle of colour ink for Sweet Bug to paint her winter wonderland.
Hope this home of winter wonderland could inspire some friends from MYSJ to draw or paint or write something about their dreams. Thx for reading and your time. Hope you enjoy the photos, though it was not professional, but are unique and special.