Back to East Coulee

On the weekend of August 9th and 10th I went back down to the badlands.  I had some work to do at the shop in East Coulee.  I had to try and make sense of the accounting at Palcoprep as a result of the recent resignation of our bookeeper.  She was a really nice elderly lady, but she had some serious personal issues and bailed out on us with little notice.  I took all three of the girls along with me for the weekend.  Margarit had plans to drive Julia down to the Calgary airport to catch her flight back to Austria.  The three younger girls clearly understood that this was largely a work weekend for me and that they would have to mostly entertain themselves.  They were pretty good about it and spent most of their time watching movies, walking the dogs and riding their bikes around East Coulee.

By Sunday morning most of my work was done and I had a little time to spend with the girls.  We went for a walk across the old timber bridge.  Initially the girls were pretty nervous about breaking through the deck of the rotten old bridge but once they got over their fears, we enjoyed a nice walk together.  We even saw a few little garter snakes slithering around on the south end of the bridge.  

We packed up the trailer and unhitched the truck.  I was leaving the trailer locked up in the yard of the East Coulee shop as I knew that I would return next weekend. There was no point dragging the trailer all the way home, only to drag it back a few days later.

After packing up we did a little exploring around the valley.  We checked out a few of the backroads before eventually making our way towards home.  We found some wild sunflowers, some interesting badlands and even a field of flax.  This flax field had been blooming a beautiful light blue when we drove past it on our way to East Coulee.  Now two days later, with  the trailer unhitched we had the option to park on the side of the road beside the field and found that the bloom was mostly done.

At Palcoprep we have been working on the construction of a replica of an Ichthyosaur skull.  This is a prehistoric dolphin like marine creature from 65 million years ago.  The skull alone is over 8 feet long, and the entire creature was of a substantial size.  This skull was found up in northeastern British Columbia, not far off the Alaska Highway, between Fort St. John and Fort Nelson.  The original specimen is housed at the Royal Tyrell Museum.  We took a 3D scan of the skull and then digitally recreated the original proportions of the skull under the direction of the Japanese paleontologist that found it, and was the world's expert.  The original specimen had been flattened and distorted in preservation and we were re-creating it in it's proper proportions.  Once this digital recreation had been completed we CNC carvied a life size replica which would eventually be articulated, plastic coated, and painted to resemble the original fossil.  This also required the construction of a steel armature that would support this reconstruction for display.  Once this process is all completed, this reconstruction will be shipped to Japan for display.

Once the girls and I wrapped things up in the valley, we hit the road for home.  We made a brief stop up in the town of Big Valley.  This railway town is a cool place that I have photographed numerous times in the past.  This time around I took a bunch of record shots with my new digital camera.  We will keep these images on file for future promotion of the East Coulee studio to the motion picture industry.

A few more....

Back in early August when I was processing my last batch [for now...!] of infrared film I didn't have time to get around to scanning and posting all of the images.  These last few were all taken down in Utah, back in the fall of 2013.

Yet More Infrared Negatives

Earlier this week I processed yet another batch of 4" x 5" Kodak High Speed Infrared negatives.  This now sees me almost completely caught up on my processing of THIS film.  I have just a few exposed negatives left and they were all shot in recent weeks.  I now need to save up some more until I have a large enough batch to process again.  So, in the interim I will turn my attention to some of the other types of film that I have accumulated for processing.

I didn't have time to scan and post all of the negatives tonight.  I've scanned all of the recent ones from 2014.  This includes several taken on the Monochrome Guild Spring Photo Weekend spent shooting out in the area of Fairmont Hot Springs, British Columbia.  There are also a few that were taken during recent weekend camping trips, including a couple of overview shots of the town of East Coulee, with my building visible near the center.

There are a few more negatives in this batch that I have not yet had time to scan.  These half dozen images are all from last October's trip down to Utah.  I hope to find time to scan and post these in the coming days.....

Weekly Riding Lesson

The two older girls have a weekly riding lesson every Tuesday at 7:30PM.  These are at Kel-J-Do Stables out at Beaumont.  Helena often comes along, but is not yet taking lessons.  The girls really enjoy the lessons and are getting to be pretty good riders.  They are quite comfortable riding bareback, english or western and are starting to do a number of different maneouvers intended to help them gain their balance and their confidence.  I took them to their lesson on Tuesday right after the long weekend.  They practiced picking up some balls placed on top of some large pylons, as they trotted by on their mounts.  Picking them up proved easier than placing them back.  These photos were actually taken at their lesson on the Tuesday before the long weekend, which I also took them to...

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.

New T-Shirt

Got a new T-Shirt that I quite like.  Wore it all weekend while we were camping.......

Mountain Trail Ride - August Long Weekend

With our favorite campsite and dude ranch closed for the season, we had to get our trail riding fix somewhere else.  We decided to head out to the front ranges of the Rockies and go for a trail ride at McKenzies Trails West.  This stable is right along the David Thompson Highway, between Nordegg and Saskatchewan Crossing, not far from the shores of Abraham Lake.

This weekend I was going camping with seven women.  Back in my younger days this would have been exciting.  Trust me, it sounds a lot more glamourous than it really is... especially since the majority of them were under twelve years of age.  Julia is still here in Canada and came along with us for the weekend.  This was not her first time on a horse... but the first time in about 30 years [Ha Ha!]....  Margarit's girlfriend Shelley and her daughter Amy joined us as well.  We met up at the Harlech Campsite, east of Nordegg, on Friday evening.  It was relaxing to sit around the fire for a while after a busy week.  We turned in moderatly early as we had to pack up and hit the road by about 9:30AM the next morning.  It was still a 3/4 hour drive from here to the stable and we needed to be there by about 10:30.  Surprisingly we made it with a little time to spare.

Four other riders, from Saskatchewan and Manitoba joined us.  We headed out right on time... at 11:00AM.  We were on what they called the Canyon Ride... a three hour ride, with a lunch break, up to Coral Creek Canyon.  Normally the cost is 100 bucks per rider, but this time around we qualified for the volume discount.  

The family that runs the stable is really nice... Something about horse people... they all seem to have a real down to earth quality.  This was to be Helena's first ride on her own.  In years past she had always been a passenger in a buddy saddle.  This time around she had a horse to herself, though she was led by our guide... Logan.   Helena and her fearless steed "Dino" seemed to really hit it off and she did really well.  

The trail wound up through the trees for a while and eventually we broke out onto a high ridge above Coral Creek Canyon.  This is a small creek that feeds into Cline River, and then later into the North Saskatchewan.  We stopped at a really scenic spot with a view over the creek and had our lunch.  After lunch we mounted up again and took a different trail back through the trees to the stable.  The weather was sunny and warm and we had a great afternoon.  I'm sure we'll be back here again....

Maybe next time we'll try the steak ride... which includes a Steak BBQ dinner!