Hello and welcome back to my blog. In this blog post, I will be talking about the Alberta field study I went on with my class! 

This trip was extremely amazing. We went to a lot of great places. This trip was mainly based off of the CPR(Canadian Pacific Railway) though but we went to other places as well. Obviously, this was not a vacation. It was a field study. Which meant that we had a lot of work to do. Our main focus was the identity project. We had to make a video. Since it was the main project, I made a separate blog post about it. Feel free to read it. Back on track, that wasn’t our only project. We had to make a lot of other ones. Each project is video based. Which meant  had to make videos for each project. I will talk about the videos later. So, let’s continue talking about our trip.

Places

On this trip, we visited lots of places. Some of the places that really stood out to me were the Buffalo Ranch, Columbia Icefield, and Craigellachie.

Buffalo Ranch 

The Buffalo Ranch is quite a cool place. Even though there is one worker, there are a lot of bison. Bison are like buffalo but a different way to say it. It’s quite amazing how you have to train day by day to make the bison know who you are. The Buffalo Ranch is very unique place since the bison was actually endangered in the past. Back than when people made rails for trains, sometimes they have to blow a hole through the mountain to be able to get to the other side. Sometimes the bison will interfere with the construction and the workers would kill them too.  Tap on the book below to see some pictures.

Columbia Icefield 

The Columbia Ice Field is also quite cool. This is my second time there. As far as I know, when I first when there a couple of years ago, I’m pretty sure the glacier was bigger. Apparently, the glacier is getting smaller each year by three meters. I guess that’s why it was different. There is actually a skywalk as well. From the skywalk, you can see nature and sometimes even wildlife. It’s a great place for pictures. I do recommend you to go to this place because I doesn’t just include nice views, it includes history about wildlife and glaciers as well.

Craigellachie 

Now onto Craigellachie, a more historical place. To me, it is probably one of the most important places in Canada. It is where the last spike of the CPR(Canadian Pacific Railway) was driven into the ground. It was driven on November 7th 1885. The Railway came from Montreal and all the way to BC. The reason I really enjoyed going here is because it’s a great place for learning about the CPR and taking pictures. It shows that Canadians can finish what they’ve started.

CPR

Before we go into our projects, I want to talk about the Canadian Pacific Railway. The Canadian Pacific Railway played a major role during the process of promoting tourism and immigration, as well as Canada’s war efforts through the years. It was built between 1881 and 1885 and it owns about 20000 kilometres of track from Vancouver to Montreal. As I said before, the last spike was driven on November 7th 1885 by Donald Smith.

Beakerhead 

When we were in Calgary, there was something called Beakerhead. Beakerhead include scientific, art, music, creations made by artists, engineers, and scientists. Maybe even musicians. Each of these people create beacons throughout Calgary to show it to their community. Beakerhead can really bring people together and it only happens once a year if I remember correctly.

Group Projects

Now for our projects, we had four different videos to make. Two were in groups and two were individual. For the two group videos, we had to make a ghost town video and a enchanted forest video. The ghost town video is a silent film in a ghost town. A silent film is a film without dialogue and sound effects but there may be music. The enchanted forest video is a short movie we had to film in a fairy tale forest(kinda). We had to use figures and buildings in the forest.

Individual Projects

Onto the individual videos, we had to make two as well. The first one is the identity video. It’s about Canadian Identity and how the land impacts it. That’s all I’m going to say because I want you to actually read my identity video post. The video is also in the other post.

A Little Something Special

What I have here is a little book of the best pictures I took on the trip!

In The End

In the end, Alberta is a pretty cool and interesting place with loads of activities and other things to do. To be honest with you, the food was great. I had this one milkshake called the Young Elvis and it was amazing. The Young Elvis is a peanut butter-banana milkshake. It may sound disgusting but it tastes amazing. This trip has made me understand the identity of myself as well as the identity of other people in Canada. It was a great learning opportunity and I’m glad I went on the trip. In conclusion, the trip was fantastic.