Photo blogging challenge host PJ aimed to let us off easy this month, assigning the theme Free For All for June 2026. My initial reaction? Free for all = anything goes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But then I looked up the definition. The first use of the term dates back to 1874, and referred to a competition or dispute or fight, open to all comers, with no rules. Hmmm, that might not be such an easy concept to capture in photographs – at least in my usual mix of activities.

After some more digging, I relaxed. Other definitions include:

• Freely available for use or participation by all;
• An uncontrolled situation in which people do what they want because there are no limits to stop them;
• Disorganized;
• Scrambled;
• Jumbled; and
• Everything out of order.

Also, the Photo Blogging Challenge is freely available for participation by all, so I’d use that to argue that any photo taken by any PBC participant automatically fits this month’s theme!

Here are five instances when my experience of June felt free for all in some way…

1. Mother Nature’s Riot

June is when spring finally arrives in the Canadian Rockies. On one walk to downtown Canmore, I noticed 46 distinct types of wildflowers in bloom. And that excluded most of the vetches, which I have never bothered to learn to identify. We spotted this beautiful bunch of yellow Lady’s-Slipper Orchids on one of our bike rides along the Bow Valley Parkway.

And by the third week of June, the untamed grasses in our backyard were already taller than my knee, so I spent 4 hours, split over two days, swinging the weed whacker to knock everything back for the next round of growth. It’s great to once again see the squirrels and chipmunks running around back there.

June is closing with a major rain event that’s triggered several landslides and road washouts in Kanaskis country. Some neighbourhoods in Canmore are under evacuation alert, as the steep creeks fill up with accelerated snow melt in addition to all the rain. So far, the flood mitigation infrastructure put in place after the June 2013 flooding has worked. Fingers crossed…

2. Bear 188

We’ve seen a LOT of bears this spring – on almost every bike ride. Most have been black bears. But on our annual ride up Highwood Pass before it opened to traffic middle of the month, we saw two grizzly bears. One ignored us. The other – Bear 188 – was not pleased we were pedaling along right when and where he wanted to cross Highway 40. Of course we didn’t appreciate that he (yes, Bear 188 is a youngish male) wanted to cross the road.

We had stopped a couple of hundred yards back, after I spotted him beside the road. Bear 188 lumbered towards us on the opposite side of the road. As he closed the distance to under 75 meters, I said, “I’m out of here” and started pedaling downhill. Mr GeoK was shooting a video clip with his phone, but once Bear 188 reared up on his hind legs, Mr GeoK was right behind me!

The chaos lasted less than a minute. Once we widened the distance, we looked back to see Bear 188 climbing the slope on the other side of the road, where he headed into the trees. That was fine with us. After a few deep breaths, we turned back uphill to finish our planned ride.

For a more fulsome recap of our annual Highwood Pass ride, watch Mr GeoK’s Relieve here. And speaking of Mr GeoK, this is one of his photos. But since our theme is Free For All, I decided the usual rule of having to take the photos yourself doesn’t apply this month! 😉

3. Scrambled Reflections and Refractions

The special Yayoi Kusama’s INFINITY MIRRORED ROOM – LET’S SURVIVE FOREVER exhibition is on now at the Art Gallery of Ontario. There are strict rules to view the installation. You must leave any bags outside, a maximum of 4 people can enter the installation at any time, and visits are limited to 60 seconds. Once inside, the mirrored walls, ceiling and balls create multiple copies of visitors and make you scramble to try to figure out which way to look.

We were very lucky – pretty much no one else was there the day we visited. So we circled around 4 times, for a total of 4 minutes in the installation. The fourth time around we discovered something we’d missed the first 3 times. It created even more jumbled reflections on a multiplicity of balls.

I’m using two photos for this experience. Again, it’s a free for all month, so the 5 photo requirement doesn’t apply!

4. Heaven on Earth?

One of the stops of my list of places to visit over the course of a day of solo sightseeing in Toronto = a bean-to-bar chocolate shop. I first mentioned bean-to-bar chocolate on this blog back in 2023, after we attended the Northwest Chocolate festival while in Seattle.

For this stop, I’m glad I did some advance research to narrow down the varieties of bars I wanted to purchase, otherwise I’d have been dithering over the wide selection of bars, chocolates and baked treats. When I left, I carried 22 bars of chocolate in a brown paper shopping bag. And my tummy was full thanks to the best gelato cone I’ve had since we visited Italy in 1995 (one scoop each of lemon yogurt and rhubarb flavours).

BTW, we were with a larger group in Toronto and the majority expressed a strong preference for milk chocolate. Whereas we we prefer dark. What about you?

5. Photographic Free For All

Mr GeoK and I had a chance for “just the two of us” sightseeing our last full day in Toronto. We started with a tour of Queen’s Park (the Ontario legislative building). Next up we spent a few hours at the Royal Ontario Museum where we enjoyed a special exhibition about bees, another one about Japanese touchable art forms and stepped back in time to examine some of the fossils from the Burgess shale beds here in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Yeah, I know, it’s kinda weird that we have to go to Ontario to see fossils from what’s basically in our expansive back yard. The only other option is to join a Parks Canada guided hike to the Burgess Shales or Mount Stephen.

We spent the afternoon at the Art Gallery of Ontario (aka AGO). Unknown to us at the time, the 2006/07 expansion of the AGO was designed by recently deceased architect Frank Gehry. In a photographic free for all, we spent quite a bit of time composing A LOT of different images of the curving wooden “Baroque Staircase.” Again, I am including two photos from this experience.

Also, the art exhibitions were top notch and we had time to only see a fraction of what’s on display.

Wrap Up

There you have it. Seven photos and a bunch of text that is free for all to read. I hope I managed to convey at least a small measure of the fun I had putting this post together.

To see what was chaotic, uncontrolled or simply free in the lives of the other PBC participants, click through to host PJ’s post, here, and scroll down to the linkup at the bottom.

While you’re at it, please consider joining us for July. PJ will post the theme at the end of his post. You’ll need five photos, some minimal amount of text and a blogging platform. Hit me up with a comment if you’re looking for a free blogging option.