Imagination was all important to a boy growing up in the working class entrails of a large city.  Books were the fuel for an active imagination and I remember one in particular. It had illustrated short stories which involved much daring-do and were set in places so exotic they were fantastic. In the middle of the 20th century it was possible to imagine that headhunters  still stalked the jungle of Borneo; that there were still places undiscovered. A favourite tale was set in the American Wild West. It had a double page illustration of the  buffalo hunt; an Indian brave and painted pony as one at full stretch, bow drawn, all muscle  and sinew, nostrils flared, foam and flint and skill and courage. I remembered that painting in  all its graphic heroic splendour as we rode into South Western Alberta on our way to a place  called Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump a World Heritage listed anthropological site where First Nations people hunted buffalo by driving them over a cliff. Head-Smashed-In has an excellent education centre.

Imagine my surprise when the education centre made clear that at the Head-Smashed-In site buffalo were not hunted on horseback but on foot and without bows. Surprisingly, the horses, even the beautiful painted ponies, were only used in the last years of buffalo hunting before the herds were hunted to the edge of extinction for their pelts. The first horses arrived on the  northern plains in the 1730s, by the 1780s the horse had not only changed the way the Plains Indians made a living, it had also dramatically changed their society.

We often hear it said that we belong to a technological age and that our young are particularly technologically adept but this seems to me rather hubristic. New technologies over the last  one hundred years have taken about 15 years, or one generation, to move from introduction to general adoption. This was case with mobile (cell) phones and computers, the last two new technologies of significance. Looking back a few years, microwave ovens took a good 15 years from introduction in the 1950s to general acceptance sometime in the late 1970s.  Compared with the speed with which the Nations of the Plains adopted the horse this seems an unremarkable performance for the horse changed not only the techniques for hunting and fighting but also moved the society from being relatively egalitarian to hierarchical with ownership of horses as a measure of power.

Impressed and suitably chastened by our visit to Head-Smashed-In, we thought it might be  time to cut our losses with the cold snap in this part of Canada so we crossed into the US state of Montana on a little used back road. Our intention was to ride the famous Road to the Sun through Glacier National Park. This was, we were assured, an amazing, narrow and torturous alpine road that we were sure to enjoy. That was the advertising at any rate. After a  rather slow start trying to find fuel in a village busy closing down for the winter, we headed for the hills. The ride started poorly. The first 30 km of road were under repair, and we were reduced to a slow crawl behind cars and bikes obviously afraid they might get their wheels dirty. Things did improve, but not much. The traffic was so heavy we ground on for hours waiting to get back to the lowlands and find a place to stop.

A few days later and a little further south we were dreading the crowds in Yellowstone National  Park. It is after all, one of the most famous parks in the world and a perennial  favourite for American families. Our fears were, however, unfounded. The crowds had dwindled late in the season and we managed three enjoyable days, enough time to see a good  selection of the attractions. It was in the carpark for one of the bubbly, steamy sights that we  met Steve and Janette a UK couple travelling on a Triumph. They had just ridden the Beartooth Highway and gave it a great wrap. We pulled out our maps and found the Beartooth. We were  going in the opposite direction. Well, we were going in the opposite direction, but now...