Recent Game Camera Photos

When Annelise and I left Nordegg on July 9th, I pulled the memory card from my game camera.  It had been accumulating photographs since early June.  

The fox was a regular visitor.  We got a dump of snow on June 7th.  Hard to believe that three weeks later we would set records with high temperatures of 40C.  In fact the camera recorded a temperature as high as 43C, but that is probably not accurate as the camera is in full sun.

The deer looked to be very pregnant in early June, and the camera didn't capture any photos of fawns.  Even in late June and into early July some of the deer are still looking fairly round...!

There were two dead trees in the yard that had partly fallen over.  In any images prior to June 16th you can see them in the upper left corner of the frame.  They kind of got hung up against some other trees, bending a healthy poplar, pulling on the spruce immediately in front of the camera, and bent against one of the background trees.  On June 16th they came crashing down, though we weren't at the cottage at the time.  I cut them up a short time later and Annelise and I hauled the logs away for splitting.

A herd of elk started to visit.  There are at least eight of them, and the herd includes a couple of young calves and one bull.  It will be interesting to see how big his antlers get, and whether they keep coming around.  
The antlers of the White Tail bucks continued to get larger and larger through the month.  Looking forward to seeing some of the fawns soon.

Sunday Day Trip

After photographing the abandoned chemical plant, Arturo and I hit the backroads and went exploring.  We found a number of old abandoned farm yards, and stopped to photograph a couple of them.  This area seems to include a lot of old homesteads.  The landscape itself is quite visually interesting with rolling hills, small areas of trees, and open crop land.  We both agreed that this is an area worth another day trip to explore in further detail.

We did see a little wildlife while we were out and about.  When we went to check out an old barn, a Mule Deer buck, with his antlers in velvet, bolted out and took off into the bush.  Later, when we were photographing in an old shed, there was a very annoyed Robin.  Her nest was on the windowsill and she was very anxious about us being nearby.  We disturbed her a little in making a couple of photos, but never touched her nest and she promptly returned to it when we were done.  Near the end of the day I saw a large garter snake take off through the grass in an abandoned yard.  It was one of the biggest I have ever seen and was about 2-1/2 feet long and close to an inch in diameter.  Like the deer it was too quick for me to get a snapshot.

Industrial Plant

On Sunday July 11th I headed out on a day trip with my friend Arturo.  We decided to explore an abandoned chemical plant.  This plant had once produced fertilizer.  Water was injected into underground caverns to dissolve the deposits of minerals.  This brine was pumped to the surface and the water was evaporated away, leaving the chemicals behind.  There was quite a sizeable operation on this site at one point in time, but it was shuttered in the 1980's.  Eventually all hope of restarting it was abandoned, and the buildings were torn down and the equipment removed.

All that remains of the original operation is some foundations, and part of the power plant.  There is a large gas turbine, connected to a big generator.  The building that once housed it is gone, and the equipment is slowly rusting away.  Looters have stripped down much of the equipment and stolen the copper wire for scrap.

Around the turn of the millennium the site was resurrected and a test operation was set up.  I understand that they explored the possibility of using the underground caverns for storage.  I'm not clear if they were planning to store waste oil and chemicals, or if it was to capture carbon dioxide.  Obviously that operation failed as well.  There are some remnants of that operation still on site, including a trailer, with a control room, and a massive monitoring station.  This included all sorts of valves and piping, gauges and sensors, much of it still there.  There are some large tanks and many smaller barrels that sit abandoned, leaking oil.  So, it seems the waste oil storage idea was possibly what was being considered.

Arturo and I photographed here for several hours.  We were left completely on our own, and no one questioned our presence.  I always find it difficult to photograph abandoned stuff like this as the subject is so busy and cluttered and it is difficult to distill any sort of concise composition.  But we gave it a valiant try and I think I shot something like half a dozen different setups.  It remains to be seen if anything yields a printable image.

The day was fairly hazy.  I think it must have been smoke from the 300+ forest fires burning over in British Columbia.  The town of Lytton was wiped out by a fire during the recent heat wave.  If you looked straight up you could see that the sky was mostly blue.  But looking horizontally it was very grey and hazy.  Fortunately by mid afternoon the breeze seemed to clear things off a little.