Up at 3:00 a.m. This is the time for all of us to be up and at it. Rising early gives us a jump on so many things, like being smug.

Getting up that early really does make me feel superior, and I can use the extra time to judge others, and to find them wanting.

Actually, what I did do is use that time to bash out a project on my laptop. It truly is the best time for writing.

Then off to Nose Hill Park where the sun was just inching above the horizon. The sky was completely blue-not a single cloud. The mountains looked bigger too. Some cool mornings they seem to rise up and lean east as though they are trying to impress, and they do.

I walked for an hour and a half along the eastern slope. Just off the parking lot I could hear coyotes yipping over the hill. A half moon loomed overhead. Later I kicked up a bunch of white tail dear.

Our snow is gone now except in the valleys and thickets and on trails especially heavily travelled, where the snow became ice.

I also came across a great glacial erratic, a large boulder, plunked there millenia ago by a retreating glacier.

On the prairies these are also usually ringed by what looks like a broad path, the result of thousands of buffalo over thousands of years using it to scratch their leathery sides.

It is too early yet for crocuses. The only colour really are the small red buffalo berries. In their honour I have written the following:

Dear little red buffalo berry.

Winters must seem very scary

But stiff and brave you stand there still

Against the fiercest winter chill

With you stands a bent wolf willow

Clouds above shift and billow

I'm getting cold so I think I'll go

Too bad for you we're expecting snow.

Some prairie doggerel for you. Actually it should be nice today. In fact I may need an auxiliary hike later, but for now breakfast beckons.