A Visit to Nordegg with the Austrians

On Friday August 26th I took Karl and Martina to the Edmonton Eskimos football game at Commonwealth Stadium.  I think they were a little bewildered by the game and struggled to understand what was going on.  At the end of it all I had lost my voice but the Green and Gold came out victorious over the visiting Saskatchewan Roughriders.  The next morning, with the trailer already packed up and ready to go, we hit the road for Nordegg.

The weather was not great but we made the best of it, hoping to show our visiting family our new property, and an area of Alberta near and dear to our hearts.  When we arrived at our property just after lunch on Saturday it had obviously recently finished raining.  There was standing water everywhere and it was very cool and damp.  We had trouble getting the soggy firewood to burn, even with the tiger torch.  Nobody ventured far from the campfire for long but we made the best of it and enjoyed the evening.  The next day it was cooler and still overcast.  We set out for a drive down the Forestry Trunk Road to Ram Falls.  It had been a couple of years since I had been down that way and we wanted to show Karl and Martina the spectacular front ranges of the Rockies.  We got hit by a few light showers along the way but mostly it was just overcast.  The Ram River was running higher and faster than I had ever seen it at this time of year.  We walked over to the viewpoint at the edge of Ram Canyon and did a short hike through the forest.  With all the wet weather this year there were mushrooms everywhere and we enjoyed exploring and finding them all.

While we were at the viewpoint overlooking the falls, Martina spotted a Bighorn Ram on the cliffs on the opposite side of the canyon.  If you look closely in this first overview image, you can spot him on the cliff, near the top.  This is followed by two telephoto images taken across the canyon, from the viewing platform.  Later we headed down to the river beside the bridge and wandered around on the gravel bar for a a while.  Lots of interesting rocks and fossils down here and I even found a small, partial cast of an ammonite.

By late afternoon we began to make our way back to Nordegg.  We stopped for a little while at the Aylmer Campsite where the Trunk Road crosses the North Saskatchewan River.  The water here was running high as well.  A short time later we continued on our way.  As we passed over the ridge and started to make our descent down towards Nordegg we came across a herd of wild horses just off the road.  Being the horse lovers that they are, the girls tried to approach them.  These guys were definitely wild as they were very skittish and did not let the girls get very close at all.  After admiring them for a while we made our way back to our trailer in Nordegg and got the barbecue going for our evening meal.  We sat around the fire for quite a while in the evening and although it still got pretty cool, it was not nearly as damp as the night before.