Stone Ruin

On Friday October 2nd Margarit and I headed down to East Coulee.  I went into work in the morning and loaded up a bunch of my personal stuff that had accumulated there over the last 40 years.  The largest items in this load were five crates full of framed prints, mostly left over from the travelling AG2 and Procession West shows a few years ago.  I suppose I should have been a little more diligent at trying to sell these as now I have to store them.  I also loaded up most of the frame stock that I brought home a few days ago and took that along with us.

We took the new truck that I bought back in the spring.  This will be my day to day vehicle once I retire and no longer use the company truck.  I'm quite impressed with the performance and mileage of this new truck, particularly since it is not even broken in yet, and will only get better.

We arrived down in East Coulee around 4:30 on Friday afternoon.  We spent an hour or so unloading all this stuff and putting it away.  It was all relatively easy as there was a forklift both at the skylight shop and in East Coulee that made short work of it.  After we finished unloading Margarit and I made a meal of BBQ burgers and then took an evening walk around town.

Dinosaur Valley Studios is working on a large sculpture of a Hadrosaur with some eggs.  It sits on a base that measures about 8 feet by 12 feet, so it is signficant.  We admired the workmanship in carving the steel reinforced foam substrate which will eventually be covered with a skin of urethane and painted.

On Saturday morning after breakfast we headed north of Drumheller and hiked in to an old stone building.  I had been here before, with my friends Rueben, Chris and Connie, but this was the first time for Margarit.  It was about 4km each way, and we had to pass through a pasture full of cows in order to get there.  The place was little changed since I was here last, about three years ago.  It looked as though someone had been out with a metal detector at some some.  There were some small holes spaded into the ground in a few locations, and some bits of scrap metal laying around.  The disk from a farm implement, the rusty door of an old stove, and a few other bits and pieces.

We explored and photographed here for an hour or two before hiking back out to where we had left the truck.  By the time we got back to East Coulee later in the evening we were both pretty exhausted.  We had a dinner of pasta, and hung out at the shop and had a few drinks in the evening.  The Pedometer app on my phone said that we walked over 10km on this day.  And that was with a large format camera kit on my back.  This combined with the shitty mattress in our trailer made for a pretty sore back the rest of the weekend...!