Cowboy Trail

Wednesday/Thursday - Sept. 1-2.  This morning we said goodbye to Dave and Mazie, and Ar'gent.  They are headed to Medicine Hat, then over to the Crazy Horse area in South Dakota. 

We had a lot of fun with them and really enjoyed traveling with them.  Joe even said his goodbyes to Ar'gent (who probably won't miss him, since Joe teases her unmercifully).

 

We headed out about an later, but we only went about 20 miles to the Leduc Energy Museum, a history of oil and gas exploration in this area.  We toured the museum and watch their video, but it started raining when we went outside so we didn't get to look over too much of their outside exhibits.

We climbed up on the derrick and Joe relived some of his days of working on SRP's water wells.

We cut across Alberta on Hwy 39 to get back west to Hwy 22, known as the Cowboy Trail.  We saw some interesting sights on and along these highways.  The first was a very long trailer (32 axles, a minimum of 128 tires) loaded with a propane storage tank.  We saw a second one of these a few miles later, but part of the trailer was missing.

A little later, we met two "wide loads," moving some other kinds of big storage tanks - we assume for the oil fields.

These things coming at us certainly woke us up!  We saw a lot of livestock on the Cowboy Trail, cattle and horse ranches, some sheep, and one alpaca ranch.  There were a lot of fields of grain, and we think canola, and the round bales of hay dotted the fields that had already been cut.

We found a campground outside of the town of Rocky Mountain House, which turned out to be one of the prettiest campgrounds we have stayed out.  It was very grassy, and amazingly not muddy. 

 

 

It had rained during the day but finally cleared off, and we saw our first frost on Thursday morning.

 

 

We broke camp and pulled our rigs into town beside the Tim Horton donut shop, then (after we had our donuts) we went looking for the Rocky Mountain House Historic Site.  We had a little trouble finding it (outside of town a couple of miles), but we saw several deer along the way.  We ended up seeing 9 deer in total today, but one posed for us very nicely.

 

This one was a little rough looking.  We saw a mama deer with two fawns later.  We finally found our historic site, and spent several hours touring it and watching the videos.  This fort was the site of major fur trading during the 1800s.

 

All of the sites we have toured that Canada Parks has done have really been good.  They do a very nice job with their monuments and historic sites.

 

Joe, ever the fashion plate, is seen here modeling a buffalo robe and wolverine hat.

He liked the hat and it fit well, but he thought the robe must have come from a cow buffalo, and he, being the manly wide-body that he is, needs one from a bull. 

Finally, we left there and found some lunch in town (A and W Rootbeer again), then headed south.  Our next stop was in the town of Caroline, known as the home of Ice Skating World Champion Kurt Browning.  We stopped at his arena and looked over the trophies and awards on display there.  His house (I forget what city in Canada) burned down just a month or so ago, so these may be the only trophies and awards that are around - we don't know that, though.

Our destination for the night was Cochrane, because there is a rodeo there this weekend.  We pulled into our campground about 5:30, and got set up for the next 3 days.  Mazie called and said they were in Havers, Montana, so they are obviously making better time than we are.  But Dave is worried that it's going to get cold on them before they get home, so he is motivated.  We KNOW it's going to get cold on us, so we are not even trying to outrun the weather.