Back to East Coulee

On the weekend of August 9th and 10th I went back down to the badlands.  I had some work to do at the shop in East Coulee.  I had to try and make sense of the accounting at Palcoprep as a result of the recent resignation of our bookeeper.  She was a really nice elderly lady, but she had some serious personal issues and bailed out on us with little notice.  I took all three of the girls along with me for the weekend.  Margarit had plans to drive Julia down to the Calgary airport to catch her flight back to Austria.  The three younger girls clearly understood that this was largely a work weekend for me and that they would have to mostly entertain themselves.  They were pretty good about it and spent most of their time watching movies, walking the dogs and riding their bikes around East Coulee.

By Sunday morning most of my work was done and I had a little time to spend with the girls.  We went for a walk across the old timber bridge.  Initially the girls were pretty nervous about breaking through the deck of the rotten old bridge but once they got over their fears, we enjoyed a nice walk together.  We even saw a few little garter snakes slithering around on the south end of the bridge.  

We packed up the trailer and unhitched the truck.  I was leaving the trailer locked up in the yard of the East Coulee shop as I knew that I would return next weekend. There was no point dragging the trailer all the way home, only to drag it back a few days later.

After packing up we did a little exploring around the valley.  We checked out a few of the backroads before eventually making our way towards home.  We found some wild sunflowers, some interesting badlands and even a field of flax.  This flax field had been blooming a beautiful light blue when we drove past it on our way to East Coulee.  Now two days later, with  the trailer unhitched we had the option to park on the side of the road beside the field and found that the bloom was mostly done.

At Palcoprep we have been working on the construction of a replica of an Ichthyosaur skull.  This is a prehistoric dolphin like marine creature from 65 million years ago.  The skull alone is over 8 feet long, and the entire creature was of a substantial size.  This skull was found up in northeastern British Columbia, not far off the Alaska Highway, between Fort St. John and Fort Nelson.  The original specimen is housed at the Royal Tyrell Museum.  We took a 3D scan of the skull and then digitally recreated the original proportions of the skull under the direction of the Japanese paleontologist that found it, and was the world's expert.  The original specimen had been flattened and distorted in preservation and we were re-creating it in it's proper proportions.  Once this digital recreation had been completed we CNC carvied a life size replica which would eventually be articulated, plastic coated, and painted to resemble the original fossil.  This also required the construction of a steel armature that would support this reconstruction for display.  Once this process is all completed, this reconstruction will be shipped to Japan for display.

Once the girls and I wrapped things up in the valley, we hit the road for home.  We made a brief stop up in the town of Big Valley.  This railway town is a cool place that I have photographed numerous times in the past.  This time around I took a bunch of record shots with my new digital camera.  We will keep these images on file for future promotion of the East Coulee studio to the motion picture industry.