Blaine Peetso is a mill worker in Northern Alberta and a self-described daydreamer. With a penchant for the outdoors and for photography, he created The Borealist blog as an excuse to capture images of his part of the world and to rearrange the alphabet as he sees fit. Follow Blaine as he finds a particular kind of beauty in his own backyard on a late Autumn grouse hunt.
There are no mountain peaks on the horizon. No crystal clear rivers. No desert vistas or shore front beaches.
It’s just prairie parkland and boreal forest. All evergreen stands and dense aspen thickets full of thorns and tangled underbrush, with stunted black spruce and muskeg mingled in. The only break in the landscape are the scrub brush plains, agricultural fields and big muddy rivers flowing at the bottom of wide valleys.
But it’s home to me and you’d be hard pressed to find better grouse country.
And while its not as immediately picturesque as other locales, there is beauty here.
It’s often subtle and smaller in scale. You’ll have to put some miles on your boots and look for it though. There’s no travel brochure, no guidebooks and no vast trail network.
But if you have the notion to hunt these birds and follow them around, they’ll lead you right to it.
We can’t all live on the coast or in the Rockies, but there’s wonder and beauty to be found everywhere.
All you need do, is go outside and find something that inspires you to wander.
It will show itself to you, wherever your backyard may be.
