Thanksgiving Long Weekend

The Thanksgiving Long Weekend was the last family camping trip of the season.  We got a bit of a late start on Saturday morning due to my hockey game, and the fact that Helena just can't miss her weekly dance class.  It was early afternoon on Saturday before we rolled out of town.  This time around we were not travelling to the ranch in the badlands.  Rather this would be our only visit of the season to Ram Falls on the Forestry Trunk Road.

As we left Rocky Mountain House and made our way up into the high country, we started to notice patches of snow on the north-facing slopes.  Not a good sign.  We arrived at the campsite at Ram Falls in the late afternoon and there were several other trailers and campers.  We eventually found a site that we could fit into and settled down for the evening.

When we awoke the next morning it was cool and overcast, but eventually warmed up a little.  The snow that covered the ground when we had arrived the afternoon before was beginning to melt.  There was about 2" of wet snow on our picnic table, but it was beginning to disappear.  We set out for a walk over to the Falls, and I brought along my view camera.  While as was taking a few photographs from the viewpoint, Margarit and the girls went for a walk along the rim of the Ram Canyon.  A lone bighorn sheep obliged me and passed right below the viewing platform, pausing to pose for me in front of the falls.

We returned back to the trailer and the two younger girls wanted to just hang out and relax.  The small oven in our trailer was not big enough to roast a turkey for Thanksgiving so we had to settle for a nice prime rib roast.  This despite the recent E-coli scare that had shut down the main packing plant in the province and resulted in numerous illnesses.  Margarit stayed behind at the trailer to keep an eye on the roast beef, and the two younger girls while Hailey and I set off for a walk down to the Ram River.  We scampered down the steep slope of the river valley to a gravel bar and did some exploring.

We poked around on that gravel bar and found a few interesting things.  There are numerous fossils in the rocks here, mostly ancient marine fossils dating back hundreds of millions of years.  Hailey found a small fragment of an Ammonite impression, much smaller than the fossil I had recently worked on down around Fernie.  We also found a really cool spider, paralyzed by the cold on a riverside rock.  And a waterworn and beaten up old elk skull.  Eventually we made our way back to the trailer for Thanksgiving dinner.  As we crossed the airstrip on our way back we came upon a solitary bighorn sheep, perhaps the same one that had posed for me earlier.

We enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner in the trailer and then relaxed around a fire for a little while in the evening.  It cooled off really quickly as soon as the sun went down and thankfully there was enough fire wood to keep the fire roaring for a while.  As we dozed off in the trailer a light drizzle started and it sort of lulled us all to sleep.  

When we awoke the next morning there was sort of a muffled silence.  A quick look outside made it obvious why.  The rain had turned to snow and there were big flakes silently floating down and beginning to accumulate.  After breakfast the girls went out and played in the snow and just had a blast trying to catch snow flakes with their tongues.  By this time we were the only ones left in the campsite.  We thought it best to pack up and make our way back towards civilization.  We were more than 50km off the nearest pavement, and there was no telling how much snow was going to accumulate and how quickly.  The truck and trailer ended up pretty muddy and dirty by the time we rolled back in Rocky Mountain House.  From there it was a rather uneventful two-and-a-half hour drive back home, to end the season of family camping.