I'm in Jasper, and have updates on Calgary and Edmonton. First, my winter experience in Calgary, which I typed on the bus between Calgary and Edmonton:

The prairies are an expanse of white that merges into pale grey skies in the distance, broken only be the odd farmhouse or copse of trees.

The snow isn't heavy, as the climate here is pretty dry. Still, it stays around, with winter here enduring from October until April. Snowfalls in September are normal, and snow in Edmonton in July, while rare, is not remarkable. I was listening to a Greyhound driver who lived in Edmonton for years describing how people began preparing their snowmobiles at the end of August.

Still, as infamous as Edmonton is for its winters, a lot of people seem to want to go there. Half the people at the Greyhound station in Abbotsford had tickets for Edmonton, and the bus I'm on now is packed. Admittedly, though, a lot of these people own cars but prefer to take the bus when bad winter weather threatens, and this January in Alberta has been particularly severe.

Anyway, back to where I left off. I arrived in Calgary yesterday night. It was around -20, cold, but much more bearable than how it was when I arrived in Lake Louise yesterday morning. There has been a deep freeze over the prairies for the past week or so, accompanied by blizzards and high winds, but it's starting to break up a bit now, and temperatures are expected to rise briefly above freezing next week. According to Wikipedia, Calgary can be expected to get a thaw at least once a month, with only January 1950 having temperatures stay continuously below freezing.

I like Calgary, but it's a hard city to get into. The Trans-Canada Highway turns into an urban road, and the highways that approach the city from the north and south turn into the Deerfoot and Bow Trails that bypass it to the east and west respectively. I had to drive three-quarters of the way around it before I found a way in when I drove in this September. And the Greyhound depot is out of the CBD and away from the city's excellent network of public transport. Still, it's not too far to walk - one of the advantages of a city the size of Calgary (about one million people) is that you can walk more or less everywhere. And as I said, it's public transport is excellent. It has, I believe, the most cost-effective light rail network of any city in North America.

So I walked. The streets in the inner city were more or less clear of snow, but the sidewalks outside were like the trails on the glacier I saw on Mt. Rainier. As is my custom, I stopped first at Earls for dinner (I always eat at Earls when I go to Calgary - it's part of my ritual of visiting the city) then walked over to the hostel on the east side. Calgary has a sensible grid network, and I've always found it easy to find my way around.

Calgary sits in the valley of the Bow River, near where the prairies dramatically collide with the Rockies. I've always thought that it's odd that there should be a large city here - it's certainly a landscape that suggests nature is charge and man doesn't really belong. I could see something of that struggle walking in - the skyscrapers were wreathed in smoke from their furnaces, burning constantly and holding the Arctic air masses at bay.

I do really like Calgary. It's my favourite North American city, and all of the cities I've seen it's the one that I've come closest to planning on living in for a while. Like Brisbane, it is a city that retains a great deal of small-town feel about it. I also like it because it seems to bring all of the advantages of the best American and Canadian cities (a neat grid, good customer service, a great transit system and a neat observation tower) without any of the common disadvantages (like bad traffic and begging).

Its major disadvantage is, of course, the length, darkness and cold of the winters, so I was particularly interested in seeing the city in winter for myself. Plus it seems to have some sort of personal significance for me, but I'm not sure what. I thought for a while that I'd end up getting a good professional job here, making it the place where my life would finally work out. That doesn't seem likely now, but there's something about Calgary that keeps drawing me back.

The locals seem to have adapted to the cold remarkably well - I saw plenty of people in pea coats and leather jackets, even though it was still -16 and snowing lightly. The +15 walkways were seeing fairly heavy use, though, and every now and again someone would dart from a car to a building or from one building to another wearing indoor clothes.

Even in these conditions, though, I found myself idly fantasising about living here. Catching the train into the CBD to work. Walking over to the MEC (Mountain Equipment Co-op) or to the large vintage clothes store a block away. Going to Canmore, Banff and Lake Louise regularly on weekends. Dining here, shopping there. Living in one of those nice houses in the suburbs.

And here's my experience in Edmonton:

I'm typing this on the bus from Edmonton to Jasper. It's fairly empty, so I've got some room to spread out. Now all I need is a power point and Wi-Fi and I'll be set. At any rate, I'm able to give much more detailed updates than I otherwise would be.

I arrived in Alberta's capital at night, having caught the afternoon bus from Calgary. I haven't had a chance to look at the weather report as the internet in the hostel room is pretty feeble, but I can tell that it's cold. The snow is also much heavier, and the roads and sidewalks are covered so thickly with snow and ice that some footpaths were marked only by lines of footprints in the snowdrifts. Cars skid and shudder - I can hear one trying to get purchase on the icy road outside right now - and I've seen a few slip and slide while turning in intersections. The snowploughs had been hard at work, but there was no point in salting the roads in this sort of cold, so people just had to deal with the ice. I fell flat on my backside crossing the street after walking out of the Greyhound Terminal - not exactly an auspicious start to my Edmonton visit!

I only found the hostel with difficulty, and spent two and a half hours wandering around in the falling snow looking for it, coming to terms with what being outdoors at night in an Edmonton winter really means (ETA: it was -28, with a -31 windchill). The few other walkers I saw were dressed as if for the Arctic. Compared with Calgary, it isn't as neat as nicely laid-out.

Aside from some criticism of its urban design, my other immediate impressions of Edmonton is that it can't offer as many recreational opportunities as Vancouver and Calgary, being in the middle of the prairie five hours' drive from the Rockies. Not for nothing does it advertise itself as a cross-country skiing and snowmobiling centre, seeing as the main scenery here is flat, snow-covered landscape. And it doesn't have the 'Heart of the New West' character that makes Calgary interesting. And the winter weather is [expletive] terrible. Still, I'm willing to give it a fair chance, as it is, after all, an unusual place.

Edmonton is, like Calgary, a wealthy city, being the capital of oil- and mineral-rich Alberta, and the staging point for the mining and drilling operations in the north. It is the most northerly city of its size in North America, and Canada's most northern city. It is one claimant to the title of North America's most northerly city in general, depending on how you classify Juneau, Anchorage and Fairbanks. So if Calgary is in an odd and hostile location, Edmonton is even more so. Even further north, even further out on the prairies, and with even longer and colder winters. This is the northernmost point that I've reached on land so far (ETA: over 53 degrees north, over 500km as the crow flies from the U.S. border).

I'm going to check out the West Edmonton Mall, the largest indoor shopping and entertainment complex in North America (why Edmontonians should build such a thing should be more or less obvious by now), as one of the objectives of this trip is to see how the residents of the prairie cities cope with such severe winters. Then I'm going to look at heading back - I'm getting tired of sleeping on buses and in hostels, and my comfy little trailer beckons. It's a long way, though, and I might still get a chance to see some other things yet. Ideally I'm going to head back via Jasper, but the buses may work out better via Calgary. At any rate I'm looking forward to returning to climes where standing and walking around outside are tolerable!

In the end everything in Edmonton worked out, and so I'll be able to head back via Jasper and see some new countryside. I paid a visit to the West Edmonton Mall, which is, as I said, the largest indoor shopping and entertainment complex in North America. It was more interesting than the average shopping mall, having a casino, artificial beach, miniature golf course, ice skating rink and artificial lake complete with little boats you could take for a ride. Still, I wasn't all that sold on the layout - it was all kind of sprawling, and there were, remarkably, no maps at the doors. Plus it is in a bit of an out-of-the-way place, being a fair distance from the city centre. Still, it'd be fun to go on a shopping spree there if nothing else - some of the bargains on offer were pretty impressive, and there were no shortage of shops to choose from. The only other issue I had, and one that I've had a lot in Alberta so far, is that buildings are often heated to virtually T-shirt weather, so had I wanted to stay in the mall longer I'd have needed to have taken half my clothes off and put them in a locker somewhere. The locals seemed to get by simply by not wearing all that much in the first place. As in Calgary, I saw people waiting for the bus in -21 degree weather wearing the same sorts of clothes you'd see on the streets of Vancouver when it's around freezing. I imagine most of them simply go from heated vehicles to heated buildings with as little exposure to the outside air as possible. By the way - how do people with oil furnaces get the oil? Is it piped in, delivered, or do they need to go out and pick it up?

Going to the Mall I had an interesting talk with the bus driver, who had spent several months touring Australia as a young man. He talked a bit about Edmonton-Calgary rivalry and how it goes back to the start of the province's history. After the trans-Canada railway was pushed through Alberta, Calgary became a thriving city while Edmonton remained a backwater. A group of Calgary businessmen petitioned Ottawa for Alberta to be admitted to Canada as a province, and the Federal Government agreed and left the particulars to the Minister for the Interior. The businessmen assumed that Calgary would be the capital, but he didn't like their attitude and made it Edmonton to annoy them. That, at least, is the story as it's told in Edmonton.

Still, while Edmonton has its charms, I have to come down on the Calgary side of the debate. Calgary doesn't have the West Edmonton Mall, but the system of +15 walkways through the middle of the city do basically the same thing, but cover a wider area and one much more central to the city itself. Calgary is simply better-designed in my opinion, both in general and for the Alberta climate in particular. Plus it has the pedestrian mall, the tower, the railroad, and the Rockies only an hour and a half away.

We've now just passed through Edson. It's snowing again, and the wind seems to have picked up a little bit. It's blowing little waves of powdery snow along the bare patches on the highway where vehicles drive. Snowploughs have been going up and down, and in Edmonton bulldozers and bobcats were out as well. I still haven't seen any signs of salt, but I imagine it's still well too cold for it.

In the lower mainland there was a pattern where it would get cold (say, down to -5 or -10), then it would warm back up to freezing and snow as it did so. Finally it would go back to being above freezing and rainy. That pattern seems to hold true here, although it drops down to -30 or below and only warms up often to about -10. Certainly Edmonton is having a good couple of weeks of temperatures below -20, although they're slowly creeping up as they are across the province. And the snow that falls here is very different - much lighter, drier and more powdery, like sand.

The countryside has shifted from prairie to pine forest, and seeing as it's now twenty past four it's getting dark again. The visage has a certain monochromatic beauty, although I can understand how weeks and months of grey skies, white land, and dark murky green forest can give people SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder, depression caused by the winter). I'm just glad that I'm in a bus and not out in it. Every now and again we pass a small town or picturesque little farm. A lot of the smaller roads are covered in snow, and there's tracks that I assume have been made by snowmobiles. On the prairies in winter, the snowmobile is king.