Hello peoples of the Earth I am back with another post. The post is a lot different then the rest of them though. Every year each grade of PLP goes on a field study to somewhere that enhances their learning about a certain topic. Last year we went on a field trip to Oregon to understand the meaning of worldview. This year we went to Alberta to learn and deepen our understanding on identity! Now I’ve already explained the project side of the trip which you can find here. In this post I have for you all the important places that we went to and how the impacted our learning about identity.

Places

We went to many cool and interesting places on our trip. Sadly I cannot show you everything because that would make the post to long and probably would bore you to death. So I have chosen to feature the most important places that we went to.

Craigellachie

The first stop that we made was Craigellachie B.C. The reason we stopped here was because it is the place where the last spike was driven in for the C.P.R. The C.P.R. Or Canadian Pacific railway is one of the biggest things that impacted Canada’s identity. The reason for this is because without the railroad there is a chance that B.C. could of become part of the USA and Canada wouldn’t have gone coast to coast. It was very cool to see the spot where the last spike was hammered in.

Rogers Pass

If you don’t know your western Canadian history then you’ve probably never heard of Rogers Pass. I didn’t until this trip. Rogers Pass played a crucial roll in the the CPR. It was important because it was the easiest was through the Selkirk mountain range and a way for the CPR to continue its journey. While we were there I learned a lot about the history of the CPR. One of the things I learned about was the war on snow. Just like most mountain ranges Rogers Pass has huge amounts of snowfall during the winter. From the very first winter, Rogers Pass had its troubles. The heavy snowfall in the winter piled up on the mountains that overlooked the pass. Eventually avalanches would happen and back then they would wreck sections of the track as well as trains. First the government of Canada built miles of snowsheds to stop the snow from reaching the track. Although this melted was somewhat useful workers still had to clear away the snow from the sheds to prevent pile up. In 1916 the 8km long Connaught tunnel finished construction underneath Rogers Pass. This sheltered the trains from snow. In 1988 the CPR finished construction on an even bigger Mount McDonald tunnel which was 14.7km long to increase capacity.

Today Rogers Pass is home to the Trans-Canada Highway and is home to the largest mobile avalanche control program in the world.

Buffalo Ranch

One of the more interesting places we went on this trip was a Buffalo Ranch. The Ranch is owned by a very great and unique person Leo. The ranch is really cool and unique. While we were there I learned a lot about wild life, especially buffalo.

Calgary

Our most eastern stop on this trip was Calgary we were there for 3 days and had a BLAST! Two places that were really cool were the zoo and Beakerhead. At the zoo we got to see many different animals including pandas. It was amazing!

The other more important stop in Calgary was Beakerhead. Beakerhead is a annual event that brings together the arts, science, and engineering extorts to build, engage, compete, and exhibit interactive works of art, engineered creativity and entertainment. It was a very cool event and an amazing experience!

Food!

Now we move onto food. I had many delicious tasting things on this trip. One of my favourites was the Young Elvis milkshake. The milkshake was peanut butter and banana flavoured and it was delicious. Some of the amazing restaurants that we ate at were Big T’s, Red lobster for endless shrimp, and Blaze Pizza. They were all delicious and I recommend any of them.

Work

Now is the part where I remind you that even though this sounds like a lot of fun (and it was) this was still and educational field study meaning we had work to do. Now we already had our Alberta video but we also had some surprise videos that we had to film on the fly.

The first is the ghost town video. On the first day we had to film a video in a historic ghost town. Here is our video:

The second and last video we had to do was at an enchanted forest, here is ours:

Ending

I never really know how to end post… I had a great time in Alberta and I got to get even closer to my friends in PLP I am so glad I had to opportunity to go and went. That all for this post thanks for reading.

-Em