Footprints Forever

I know this doesn’t look like much. And yes, even though snow is nothing new to many of you – to many parts of the world – I am not going to bore you with a bunch of pictures from one of Victoria’s rare snowfalls.

These are reminders of the past, always lurking around, like a ghost, never to be forgotten. Footprints that millions of years old refuse to let something like snow keep them hidden.

When there isn’t snow on the ground, many mistake them for big puddles, stepping over and around them just before running up the steps of the Royal BC Museum. Who wants wet shoes, anyways? As it usually rains here, snow being rare, they fill with water, and when mercury dips below zero the footprints become mini skating rinks.

These footprints are those of the Duck-billed Dinosaur, or hadrosaur. The herbivore’s prints were first found in the Peace River Canyon during excavations for the W.A.C Bennet dam, 75-110 million after the Duck-billed dinos roamed the earth. That’s a long time ago – and to think I was standing there looking at them in 2012.

But still, despite the years, the different forces of nature like…oh…say, meteors hitting the ground (if that theory is still in circulation), and ice ages (colder than temperatures I was in when I took these pictures), and massive volcanic eruptions, dinosaurs still stay in existence, in some way or another. Ever-turning we are with theories, discoveries, and the biggest and best computer-enhanced, high-definition rendition of the creatures found on any big screen. Dinosaurs are a mystery and an existence that will fascinate young and old for decades to come.

Their previous existence still lingers, as if they are ghosts. And even though we can read about them on hand held devices, and watch movies and documentaries about what we ‘think’ they were like on various sizes of screens, they are never far from our minds and daily lives.

So as I trudged around in the snow, my own footprints to melt away in a day or so, I snapped the odd picture here and there. My wad of Kleenex was barely able to keep up with my runny nose. Snow comes and goes, and daily life keeps going; we keep trudging along. And maybe, just maybe, we little beings on this earth can leave one day having left our own memorable mark.

This is what I was thinking about at temperatures of -7, a wind chill factor of -12.



(one picture is before sunrise when the first round of snow fell, the second picture is after another round of snow.)