March Day Trip

Hailey and Helena and I went out for a drive on March 7th.  Anna and Margarit decided to stay home.  The girls and I ventured up into Lamont County.  We had to circumvent Elk Island National Park as the through road was closed for some construction.  North of the town of Lamont, not far from the North Saskatchewan River, we stopped to photograph an old house.  I shot it with both my 4x5 and 8x10 view cameras, while Hailey shot it on medium format roll film with one of my Hasselblads.  While we were shooting we saw a large Bald Eagle fly over us.

It was at this point that I discovered there must have been a foundation leak in my basement darkroom.  The camera backpack for my 4x5, which I had stored on the floor, was wet.  It has been very mild in recent days and there is a lot of meltwater running.  I suspected that the waterflow from the downpipes had backed up.  I checked when we returned to the city later in the day and confirmed that this had in fact been the case.  Fortunately there was no lasting damage.  Nothing worse than shooting out in the rain, and I made a point of spreading out all my gear and allowing it to dry, once we got back home.

After our stop at this location, we crossed the river in Smoky Lake County and followed the historic Victoria Trail.  At the Lobstick Settlement area the properties pre-date the current land survey and are laid out as river lots.  This is one of just a handful of such locations in the province.  These long narrow lots, several acres in size, all have river frontage.

In this area there is an old house that is positioned more or less right in the middle of the Victoria Trail.  I shot it once before, twenty years ago, in 2001.  At that time is was abandoned and empty.  It has since been restored by the County and there is some interpretive signage.  Its kind of cool to travel down Victoria Trial, in a westerly direction, as you can see the house, right in the middle of the road, for some distance.  The road kind of loops around it, and continues to the west.  In this instance we approached it from the other direction.

We took a couple of photographs of the old house and then decided it was getting late in the day, and we'd better be on our way back to the city.  We stopped for an ice cream, and then at a car wash to clean all the mud off my truck, before heading back home late in the afternoon.