Friday afternoon, we did the Waterton Shoreline Cruise. Before we could pay for the trip, we had to wait to make sure there were at least 6 people to go. About 12 people total went. The guide, who has lived in Waterton all his life, was quite informative. In addition to being a Canadian National Park, it was the first international peace park with Glacier National Park in the USA in 1932, UNESCO Biosphere Reserve (in co-operation with the local ranchers) in 1979, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995. One of the points he made was that only about 10% of the people who come to Waterton use the hiking trails. Most of the people don't hike because of the bears. He told us that over the years there was one fatality in the park due to a bear encounter, but 15 people have died getting too close to the edge of waterfalls. There are 4 glaciers left around the lake, all of them on the US side of the border. We saw the cut-line, and markers for the American border, half way down the lake. The 'needles that touch the sky' mountain, according to native lore, dominates the south end of the lake. Most of the mountains were renamed by the members of the Palliser Expedition for themselves. At Goat Haunt, the landing point in the USA, the rangers have begun preparing for the summer, but haven't opened it yet, so we just turned around and headed back to the dock. Waterton is noted for that fact that the prairie comes up right to the foot of the mountains here with no foothills, creating a unique ecosystem. It was heavily used by the natives, particularly the Kootenai, until they were forced west of the mountains when the Blackfoot came to the area. The geologists found that the foothills were actually pushed under the mountains here, a phenomenon known as the Lewis Overthrust. The mountains are unusual in that the rocks are inverted, with the oldest rock at the top of the mountains.
 |
| Our Cruise Boat |
|
 |
| Needles touching the sky |
 |
| Syncline and Anticline |
|
One thing the guide told us was that the Red Rock Canyon Parkway opened today at 2pm for the weekend. We promptly took advantage of that, driving to the Canyon, walking to Blakiston Falls.
 |
 |
| Harlequin ducks |
|
 |
| Blackiston Falls |
Saturday, we all got up fairly early and packed up. Karen and Dominique headed to Sue and Trev's in Calgary. We headed toward Foremost, for our visit to Writing on Stone Provincial Park, but had called ahead. Since it is their grad weekend, they didn't know if there would be space for us. Since there aren't many places nearby, we won't arrive until Monday. We checked out Lee Creek Campground in Cardston, but weren't confident that we could get satellite in their heavily treed park. We carried on to Raymond, where we found the Perrett Park only had one other trailer in it. We opted for site 1, got set up and paid for a couple of nights.
Sun, we did walk around town. Then we watched the rest of the Indy 500, then the Charlotte 600.
 |
|
Monday overnight it rained, and was still raining in the morning. After a quick breakfast, we went and got our rubber boots out of the car, as our site was a sea of mud. As we were getting everything together to leave, we noticed that we had a flat tire on the 'utility' side of the trailer. That explained why it was so hard to lower the stabilizer, since more weight had dropped on it as the tire deflated. We phoned QT Tires, but they don't have a service truck. They figured they could check the tire after lunch if we brought it in. We dug out the tire changing gear, crawled under the back of the trailer to lower the spare tire. Eventually, we got it all together and headed for the tire shop. The problem was a drywall nail in the tire, probably from the building the house near the entrance to the park. While we waited for the tire shop (1 guy) to fix the tire we went to Tru Hardware, where we found some string which will hopefully work to fix the blind at the back of the trailer. Then we headed to Subway for lunch. If it had been 15 minutes earlier, we would have missed the lineup of high school kids, so we decided to go across the street to the Burger Baron where we had a burger and donair, with potato wedges. Not bad. About 12:30 the tire was fixed. We were pleasantly surprised to find that the price was even less than we paid in Lake Charles to get a puncture fixed. After switching out the spare with the repaired tire, we headed for Foremost. Along the way, we saw a couple of antelopes. At Wrentham we stopped to make sure the nuts were still torqued tight enough.
Once we got to the Wayside Campground in Foremost, we selected a site and started getting set up in a virtual hurricane from the north (gusts to 53km/h) . Fortunately, we got a satellite signal pretty quickly so we could get inside to dry out. There was a lilac hedge behind us, which is a good windbreak when the prevailing west wind is blowing. We saw a group of goldfinches in it.
 |
| Goldfinch |
On Tuesday, walked around Foremost, checking out the library, the diesel station (which is a cardlock, but does take credit cards), and picked up a few things at the grocery store. Karen and Dominique arrived late afternoon.
Wednesday late morning we headed south with Karen and Dominique to Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park. It is situated on the Milk River, amidst a virtual forest of hoodoos.
The Visitor Centre has an extremely well done description of the culture of the time. The area is sacred to the Blackfoot people, who consulted the petroglyphs on the stones on their way to each battle. The largest petroglyph shows the alignment of battle lines between the Blackfoot and an alliance of Gros Ventre, Crow and Plains Cree.
 |
Battle Scene
 |
Left section
 |
| Middle section |
|
|
|
We took a few pictures from Police Outpost overlook, then returned to the visitor centre to have lunch at tables overlooking the Milk River.
 |
| Police Outpost |
|
On the way back, we set the GPS to take us to Aden, which is just north of a border crossing. The location of the 'town' according to the GPS was about 2 miles away from the location shown by our Back Roads book. There was nothing but a single farm yard at either location.
We saw some antelopes going out to the provincial park, and some more on our way back.
We went to the Y'all Come Back Saloon in Foremost for dinner to celebrate Karen's upcoming birthday.
Thursday morning, the girls headed back to Regina around noon.
No comments:
Post a Comment