Fish, Flowers, Bears, Moose and Sheep…and of course, the LONG Weekend Craziness!

Fish, Flowers, Bears, Moose and Sheep…and of course, the LONG weekend craziness!

This morning Jake, Nick and I got up early to go moose hunting…with the camera of course.  We headed down to Mt. Engadine where the moose seem to like to gather and on the way there saw a nice grizzly grazing on berries on the side of the road.  We were driving our old dodge diesel though and it’s so noisy that I think it scared the bear.  The only picture I could get by the time I got my camera out was the tail end of the bear vanishing into the forest…at least we have proof we saw one!

At Mt Engadine we were lucky to see a moose cow and calf and then further up the road a single cow.  They are such amazing animals.  I can never get over how funny they look, but how beautiful it is to see them.  Here are a few pictures...notice the lovely eyebrow on the cow moose!

On the way home we saw a couple of deer, both white-tail and mule, as well as a snowshoe rabbit.  Then on the way down town this afternoon, we saw some big horned sheep at the top of the Canmore hill.  There was a baby all by itself who allowed us to take its portrait.  It was so sweet.  Amazing to see so many animals and the day is only half over!  

  

On that note, I'm happy to announce that Jake finally caught a fish.  We know it's not very big, but it is a fish and I'm sure he'll manufacture a story to go with it!!!

 Each week, we get about four pallets of wood.  There are about 60 bundles to each ballet and the bundles need to be stacked in the woodshed for us to sell.  The boys have been a great help with stacking wood and carrying it to and from the shed to the truck for us.  We’ll sure miss them when they go home next weekend.  Maybe they’ll be able to come back up here sometime and stay with us again or even get a job at Kananaskis.  Our boss was very impressed with them and said he’d sure like to have them working for him in a couple years.

 

The flowers around our campground are still going strong.  The Indian Paintbrush have been replaced by sweet clover and mountain bluebells.  The grasses are absolutely stunning right now…I don’t think I’ve ever seen such colour in them. 

This past weekend, of course, was the long weekend and we had our share of crazy people up camping.  There were four Irish boys who set up camp and seemed to be nice kids…until 18 of their friends showed up and proceeded to party on.  Boy the Irishmen can drink…we cleaned up on the recycling from them alone!!!  Anyway, we had to call conservation in to put these guys to bed on Saturday night and the next morning they were a pretty quiet bunch of kids…most of them were wearing sunglasses even though it wasn’t sunny… I’m sure they were all hungover! 

Another situation was a bit more stressful.  We had some return campers who are really good people…we’ve become friends with them and they usually bring us some moose meat or a bottle of wine when they come.  Anyway, they were happily camping in their site when a fellow and his girlfriend moved in across from them.  This guy is also a return camper and not one we want in the campground.  He’s a loud, obnoxious, drunkard and his girlfriend was absolutely tweeked out on drugs.  She kept twitching and talking to herself and not making sense.   Our friends were launching their canoe and had to bypass the camp where the crazy people were and the crazies started saying things like “I’m going to take that canoe home with me”…”I think I’ll steal your generator”…and so on.  Anyway, they reported this to us and said they were really uncomfortable with these people in camp.  We were too.  We called conservation and they called the police.  As soon as the police heard the description of the crazy people, they knew who they were.  Apparently, the crazy guy had just got out of jail that same morning and had found himself a woman and a vehicle by 9:30 a.m. and decided to come camping.  Anyway, to make a long story short, the police hauled them away and we didn’t have to deal with them again.  Hopefully they won’t be back.  There are so many good people and nice families who come camping, that we really need to get these other kind of people out of there so they don’t disrupt things too much.

Oso has been having a wonderful summer.  It looks like he’s taken over Tom’s chair even though Tom put an “occupied” tag on it to lay claim to the chair.  Oh well, I guess Oso can’t read that well.