23913 posts 6/20/2011 7:39 am
Last Read:
6/20/2011 5:43 pm
|
Some
You may like this. I love his readings and his pics. I think is going senile now tho. I have read his words for years now.
He has even traveled to the US to take pics of wolves and has been to the magnet hill south of Nanton where you feel like you are going backward. This is no shit you really do. It is hard to get off that hill. You can see all the way to Vulcan from there. That is where the aliens land there space ships.
Normally, I don’t park in the middle of the road and crawl into the ditch to take pictures.
Normally, I pull off to the side of the road and crawl into the ditch to take pictures. But this time I was out on the prairie south and east of Dorothy on a road allowance that barely qualified as a road and miles away from the nearest ranch so I figured I was pretty safe.
I’d spotted a bunch of pretty little blue-eyed grass as I rolled slowly along so I just stopped, jumped out of the truck, flopped in the ditch and started shooting. I didn’t even bother to close the truck door. Not five minutes later another vehicle came along.
I’d been driving the gravel roads that criss-cross the prairie out here for over two hours and not seen a single other vehicle, not on the secondary highways, not on the connecting roads, I hadn’t even seen a tractor in a field. No, not until I’d stopped on a remote dirt trail in the last place I thought I’d see anyone else did another truck come along.
Luckily the young lady driving it was very kind and understanding of my parking faux pas and not in the least put off by seeing some guy crawling around in the grass miles from anywhere.
She was checking old oil and gas well sites for environmental concerns in the area and just happened to be on this particular road at this particular time. Pure coincidence.
She insisted she could get around me but I got back in the truck and parked it properly just in case, you know, rush hour continued. Then I crawled back in the ditch.
Blue-eyed grass is a tiny member of the iris family that grows out on the grasslands of southern Alberta and it is one of the first wildflowers that follow the crocuses and buffalo beans as spring turns to summer on the plains. It can be a bit tough to spot at first but once you notice a couple of the tiny blue blossoms you’ll find that it’s pretty common out among the grama, fescue and spear grass that dominate the native prairie.
So after I finished shooting the flowers in the ditch I continued out into the grassland on hands and knees — watching also that I didn’t plunk down on hidden pincushion cactus — and found more of them. But I wasn’t having any more luck with the light than I was with the parking.
The day had been blustery all along. Stopping to photograph a feruginous hawk nest in an aspen tree earlier I could barely keep the fluffy babies in focus as the tree swayed in the wind and of the few antelope I was able to spot there was only one standing up. The rest were hunkered down against the aggressive breeze.
Now as I lay in the grass the wind picked up even more and an ominous cloud filled the sky overhead. A thunderstorm was building off to the west and it was piling up right over top of me. I grabbed a couple more pictures and a few video clips and made it back to the truck just as the first raindrops began to fall.
It might have been a nasty winter and a nonexistent spring but you wouldn’t know it by looking around the prairie south of the Hand Hills and east of the Red Deer River. It is lush and green as far as the eye can see with horses and cattle grazing in hock-high pastures and antelope babies well hidden.
There’s lots of birds around, too, ducks on every little pothole pond — and there are a lot of pothole ponds this year — and meadowlarks, horned larks, pipits, sparrows and warblers trilling from nearly every fence post and clump of bushes. And there’s curlews.
There were four of them on the road in front of me just beyond the storm’s reach over toward Wardlow and they didn’t want to get out of my way. So I stopped to take their pictures.
Either they didn’t want to be photographed or they had babies in the area but they were noisy and aggressive as I shot my pictures, flying low overhead or landing close by and then flying straight at me, their curved bills wide open an emitting ear-piercing shrieks. I tried to shoot a bit of video of them but man, they just wouldn’t let me get focused. I left them and drove on.
The storm skirted north of me and by the time I hit Wardlow the sun was out again and the day was warming up. I saw a bunch of pheasants along the creek bottoms and a few deer on the margins of coulees.
Feruginous hawks looked out over the land from nesting boxes on poles. And the wind dropped off to nothing.
Heading back west with the window rolled down the air was perfumed by the damp left by the rain and jasmine-ish scent of wolf willow. I stopped by a thicket of it to take a few pictures.
The blossoms are hard to find tucked in among the silvery leaves and fingernail tiny but they give off a powerful smell. It’s a scent so incongruous with the surroundings that it almost seems unreal, like someone lit one of those air-fresher candles out in the middle of the plains.
But it fits somehow and it made the task of crawling around the brush with an incessant cloud of mosquitos a pleasant one. I swear that if someone could bottle the scents of wolf willow and damp soil they’d make a fortune.
The sun was nearly touching the Wintering Hills as I approached Dorothy and another storm was rolling in with curtains of rain draped below purple clouds. Lightning licked down off behind it as another in what would become a string of storms was forming. By the time I hit Drumheller the moon had risen and the wind was picking up again and as I parked by Rosebud to watch the lightning fork across the sky the storm was in full<b> fury.
</font></b>This time I stayed in the truck but I parked sideways on the road with my camera clamped to the side window. It was midnight, a storm was raging and I was on a country road with not a soul in sight. I’d be fine here.
Then, just beyond the next hill, I saw the glow of headlights. I parked properly.
I wonder if he got fucked silly by the that girl  You girls better bring your ropes to catch him. He has GF all over the place and is single. 
|
This is not meant to offend any one in any way.
 
  
|
50414 posts 6/20/2011 5:43 pm |
Quoting sasnnice:
I loved exploring the surroundings around me. I have always been a curious person and when my family came to Canada, my brothers, male cousin and myself used to take along food with us while we hiked.
Those were such fun memories for me. Thanks for sharing this Hon.
You are welcome. I did not mean to swear. It just out of me. Sorry
This is not meant to offend any one in any way.
|
|
6/20/2011 1:38 pm
|
I loved exploring the surroundings around me. I have always been a curious person and when my family came to Canada, my brothers, male cousin and myself used to take along food with us while we hiked.
Those were such fun memories for me. Thanks for sharing this Hon.
[post 2654097]... [post 2645721]...[post 2618555] ..... [post 2627548] ... [post 2645555] ...]
Taste life in all it's flavour
|
