ATV Ride

On Sunday July 16th Shawn and I went out for an ATV ride.  It was a pretty long one, and took the better part of the afternoon.  I didn't keep track of the mileage on the odometer, but I seem to recall the ride is over 20km round trip.

We started out from the cottage and crossed the highway, circling into the Nordegg townsite.  Then we went through town, up past the water towers, and up into the hills above town.  There was some open pit coal mining activity up in the hills during the last years that the mine operated, and we rode past some of these.  Then we continued on up an old road and circled in behind Eagle Peak.  The views would have been spectacular was it not for all the forest fire smoke.

There were lots of wildflowers up along the trail and we stopped to admire them in a few locations.  At the end of the trail there was a big clearing that I believe was once a lease site for some drilling activity.  It was full of wild flowers, and also some relatively fresh bear droppings.  We didn't see any bears, but I suspect they frequent the meadows and roadsides to graze on the grass and clover.

The elevation here is about 6300 feet above sea level, considerably high than the 4500 foot elevation that the cottages are situated at.  As a result the blooming season was not as advanced.  There were bunchberries blooming in my yard a couple of weeks ago, but now they are all finished.  Yet here at higher elevation, the bloom was still in full swing.

All along the trail there were lots of small shrubs and trees that were bent right over, and lots of bigger ones that were snapped of.  This is undoubtedly from the heavy snow that fell in the area in late June.  I was down in southern Alberta at that time, and did not experience it first hand.  I watched the yard on my security cameras at the time of the storm and there was an accumulation of a couple of inches down by the cottage.  But up here in the higher elevations it must have been a lot more.

I took my big camera along on the ride but never got around to shooting anything with it.  Wildflowers are not well suited to Black and White, for the most part.  And the skies were so obscured with smoke that none of the landscape images would have been particularly attractive.  Maybe next time....

Once we got back down to the cottage and put the ATV away we decided to hit the golf course and play our second round of golf.  It was surprisingly busy and I thought by Sunday afternoon most of the weekend people would have been heading home.  For the first time this year my score did not improve over my previous round.  In fact it got a lot worse, and I finished about 10 strokes higher than my previous round.  Shawn says he felt rushed by all the people on the course behind us and perhaps this influenced my score too.