Moominmama's Adventures

In which Moominmama sets out on her sixth season of travel after wintering in the high desert and decides to feature libraries in her 2026 travel reports... Moominmama begins year six of her travels after a busy winter of skiing and socializing. This year brought friends from New Hampshire and Iowa for a visit, including an overlap that allowed all of us to head to the Grand Mesa for a day of skiing together.  Despite the lack of snow in many parts of Colorado, the Grand Mesa still managed to provide reasonable conditions for cross-country skiing. Moominmama even met a skier from the high peaks of Leadville drawn to the Grand Mesa because there was no snow at home. This year, it was the East Coast that got most of the snow, often in violent and frigid bursts. My New Hampshire friends enjoyed the relative warmth of Colorado, even on the snowy Mesa! In fact, we got downright sweaty on a visit to Arches National Park in February. Enjoying the popular park in the off-season is a real d...

  In which the sun sets on Moominmama's adventures of 2025 with a return to two favorite hikes in the Tetons... The Moominhouse is about to go into storage, and Moominmama will be doing only a little car camping en route to visits with the offspring and friends back east. Come winter, she will return to Colorado for some Nordic skiing until she can set forth again with her trailer home in the spring. But I went out with a bang, hiking two favorite trails, one in Idaho on the west side of the Tetons and one in Grand Teton National Park on the Wyoming side. These were both memorable hikes that I first did in 2021.  The photo above is of the Snake River in Idaho, where I had a beautiful campsite right on the river. It put me close to the Palisades Canyon trail, pictured to the left. This is how the trail starts, with the canyon walls protecting you on either side. What you can't see here is the clear, tumbling Palisades Creek that runs alongside the trail up to Lower Palisades La...

  Wherein Moominmama hits the waters of the Coeur d'Alene basin and gets a shock when she learns about its lingering pollution... Moominmama dropped down the chimney that is northern Idaho after crossing from Kootenay National Park in Canada. Her license plate caused momentary confusion to a border guard who didn't recognize New Hampshire's Live Free or Die logo. She knows she is far from home! With a population just over 58,000 people, Coeur d'Alene is one of the fastest growing cities in Idaho. One of its main attractions is the Coeur d'Alene Lake: 25 miles long, with a plethora of bays and a shoreline of over 100 miles thanks to a former glacier. This means the city and the communities around it are very much oriented to the water. Here's the lake-facing portion of the downtown with its marina, obviously in boom mode. This is one of two sky cranes I saw downtown. This whole area was shaped by glaciers. The Coeur d'Alene River became part of an ice sheet 9...

Wherein Moominmama learns about Cambrian fossils, shares her campground with bighorn sheep and kayaks the Columbia River... The entrance to Redstreak Campground is up a steep road, and the grass on either side is a favorite of the local bighorn sheep. Moominmama even spotted them in the town of Radium Hot Springs, relaxing on a grassy verge along Main Street. The town has adopted them (or maybe vice versa), and inside its main traffic circle is what first looked like an abstract sculpture until I realized it was a giant recreation of their magnificent horns.  Radium is the entryway into Kootenay National Park on the western side of the Rockies. The park stretches from Radium to the Continental Divide and Banff, twisting northeast between mountains with rivers and creeks feeding into the Kootenay River which, in turn, feeds the Columbia River in Radium's valley. In this photo, Tookum Creek has carved a deep channel known as Marble Canyon as the green water runs into the Vermilion Ri...

In which Moominmama finally arrives in the Canadian Rockies and enjoys a land made beautiful by its proximity to glaciers... Moominmama's first hike in Yoho National Park was to Emerald Lake, pictured above. Like much of the water here, it's a piercing blue-green, sometimes clouded by glacial silt, known as rock flour. That's thanks to this guy here, Michael Glacier, barely visible through the clouds, which feeds Emerald Lake.  Moominmama is on the western side of the Rockies, staying in a town in the valley between the Columbia range and the Rockies, where the Kicking Horse River (popular for its rapids) merges with the grand Columbia. The Kicking Horse also has the mark of glaciers in its waters, the milky green of fast-moving water that keeps the pale rock flour churned up as it flows. Moominmama has seen this on the eastern side of the Canadian Rockies in the famous Banff, Jasper and Lake Louise areas east of the Continental Divide. This time, the goal is to see some o...

  Wherein Moominmama visits a land of shrinking glaciers and brilliant wildflowers and meets another friendly marmot... Behold the Meeting of the Waters, where the runoff from the Illecillewaet and Asulkan glaciers meet. Moominmama took a hike that originally led to the foot of the Illecillewaet Glacier, (pronounced ill-a-sihouette) an area that is now just a cascade of water. The glacier itself is out of view, having retreated almost a mile and about 2,000 feet vertically up the rock.  Moominmama is not yet in the Canadian Rockies. It turns out these mountains west of the Rockies are called the Columbia Range, and Moominmama is staying in a section known as the Selkirks where Mount Revelstoke and Glacier National Park are located. This is one of the benefits of travel -- I've just discovered an entire mountain range between the Rockies and the Coastal Range that I never knew existed! This year is the International Year of Glaciers' Preservation (per the United Nations), and I...