Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

Traveling across Canada this summer and fall, from Alberta to Ontario and then to New Brunswick, I fell into an imaginative way of exploring and sharing the nature of the landscape. Our three-year-old grandson Samuel could not be with us, and thinking of him, I bought a little plastic Pentasaurus from the gift shop in the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta. Posing "Pentas" having imaginary adventures everywhere we stopped to gather specimens and observations became my passion. The magic of

16 October 2014  found me astonished at the broad swath of cattail marsh that is Pipestone Creek, hemmed in by its forested valley wall, southwest of Broadview, Saskatchewan. The high sharp line of the flat prairie outside of this valley world is visible on the horizon though a gap in the trees. We are a little over a kilometre upstream of where the Transcanada pipeline crosses the Pipestone. We are past the places where we have the pipeline route mapped - so today we navigated by dead reckoning and were pleased to find signs for six parallel pipelines as they descend into the wide Pipestone valley, 17 kilometres southwest of