Blackstone River - August Long Weekend

Here is a shot of the girls having breakfast at the Harlech campsite.  This was actually shot on Saturday morning, when we were getting ready to head over to the MacKenzie's Trails West stables for our trail ride...

By the time the trail ride was over it was late Saturday afternoon.  We packed up and headed back towards Nordegg.  We turned north onto the Forestry Trunk Road and made our way up to the Blackstone River.  We pulled our trailer into the trees along the river and found a place to set up.  It was relatively busy being the long weekend, and there were about a dozen other trailer here.  Shelley and Amy decided to camp with us for one more night so they ended up pitching their tent beside the trailer.  We settled down for the evening and put together a mixed grill of burgers, smokies, chicken, salads, etc.  After dinner we got a fire going, and played a bunch of music from the collection on my iPod.  I have well over 5000 songs on my iPod and we re-acquainted oursevles with a bunch of old classics, mostly from the 1980's.  We had sort of an informal karaoke session going as we sang along to a bunch of the songs.

The next day, after sleeping in for a while, we went for a walk out along the river.  While I was out with my view camera making some photographs, the girls explored along the river and the adjoining creek.  It was quite hot and they were quickly into the very cold mountain water.  They found a calm and fairly deep pool and even went skinny-dipping.  By late afternoon we made our way back to the trailer.  Shelley and Amy packed up and headed for home.  Thre rest of us stayed behind and got a big dinner of BBQ steak and potatoes going.

Monday being the holiday, we had one more night and most of one more day to stay in the area.  Again we wandered around along the river and enjoyed the day.  It had been mostly overcast on Sunday evening and into Monday, and there were a few little spits of rain, but mostly it remained quite warm.  There are a lot of interesting rocks including some fossils here in the gravel bars of the river.  It seems that every time we come here we end up bringing home a truck load of interesting ones.  This time was no exception.  

As we explored along the shores of the river we found a lot of spots where stone fly nymphs had crawled up out of the water and onto some of the larger rocks.  Here we found their shed skins, split open along the back, where they had hatched into the adult filies.  The girls were kind of creeped out by these but I found them really cool and actually got photographs of some of them.

It was getting to be late afternoon before we were finally packed up and ready to hit the road for home. By the time we rolled up in front of the house it was approaching 9:00PM and everyone still needed a bath, and there was lots of stuff from the trailer to unpack.  Needless to say it was another late night before we finally got everything looked after.