There was mist swirling around a pasture in the hills north of the city.
It was coming from a pond a little bit to the west, the evaporation from its waters, still warm from the day before, condensing as it rose into the cool morning air. Wafted along by tiny air currents created by the radiant heat from the early morning sun, it was wrapping around the cattle and sheep grazing on the dewey grass.
The sheep were bouncing around, the young ones with their undocked tails wagging behind them just like in the nursery rhymes and the adults bleating as they nibbled away at breakfast. The cattle were further out in the haze, mostly brown and red shapes moving in the silvery mist, but one of them was lapping away at a salt block in front of me.
A young sheep approached the cow from the front and attempted to have a lick of salt for itself but as it got close, the cow put her head down and charged. The sheep ran off. Meanwhile, a pair of lambs came up from behind and this time the cow kicked, hitting one of them on the flank. It stumbled back and bumped into its companion who, I guess, took offence at the unintentional shove and immediately challenged the cow-kicked ovine to a head-butting duel.
Meanwhile, the cow went back to licking the salt. The sheep settled their differences. And all was peaceful and pastoral again.
Two days before the countryside was also peaceful and pastoral but I was out there in the heat of the afternoon instead of the cool of the morning. The last few weeks of dry, hot weather had made me curious about how the crops were doing and I wondered, too, if the dry sloughs I’d visited a couple of months ago had completely dried up again.
So I headed east toward the Wintering Hills on the other side of Rockyford.
Photographically, at least, the fields looked good. The wheat stood tall, the barley beards glittered in the sun and the canola was thick and lush and green. The pea fields, always among the first to be harvested, were nearly orange in the afternoon light. I came across one that was partially combined and it was full of young hawks - I counted around 40 - that were hunting grasshoppers, mice and voles uncovered by the machines.
But once in the hills, most of the fields were still standing, still waiting for harvest to begin.
The first of my dry sloughs was profoundly dry. The rains of June seemed to have added nothing to its basin and now it was crowded with foxtails and other opportunistic plants. The cattails along its former shore were dry and brown.
But the next slough along the chain had a bit of water in it. Brown, sulphur-stinking water but water none the less. Three months ago it was nearly empty and rimmed with bright white alkali but now the alkali was gone - or still there but dissolved - and replaced by mats of multi-coloured algae and bacteria.
I love the patterns this stuff leaves behind as the water holding it dries up. Seen from above with my little drone hovering over the slough, it looked a satellite view of an alien landscape in some spots and dry, pockmarked plains in others. Closer to the water the wet spots were green and the slough bed, blue.
Fascinating.
The other sloughs down through this valley were wetter, their formerly-cracked surfaces now stitched back together again and under several inches of water. The June rains had percolated down through the soil and partially refilled them but there wasn’t enough water to replenish the ponds at the top of the chain.
But there was more than enough for the ducks.
Mommas and their nearly full-grown broods were everywhere on the wettest sloughs and they paddled through mirror-calm waters that reflected the ripening fields around them. There was even still a bit of green in the shore-side grass and on the native prairie pastures where I found horses relaxing in the sun.
The tops of the Wintering Hills were covered with a mosaic of green canola and golden grain. Dust from combines working the pea fields hung like mist in the still air. What I took to be a flock of gull from nearby Deadhorse Lake turned out to be a dozen or more hawks riding thermals over the fields.
I had to take a detour around road construction but that led me past a field of barley that had been partially swathed so I stepped out of the truck to do a little light trespassing. Walking over to have a look at the windrows, the ground was alive with grasshoppers that leapt and clattered away with every step. Black crickets skittered everywhere, too.
Picking up a couple of seed heads, I crushed them into my palm and blew away the chaff to reveal the grain. It looked fine, a bit shrivelled, maybe, so I popped the kernels into my mouth to test the hardness. It was crunchy.
I’d seen my dad do this a hundred times back in the old days and he formed an opinion on the grain whenever he did it. How, I don’t know. Me, I had no idea what I was doing or what it meant. All I can tell you is it tasted dry.
A plume of dust coming down a road near Chancellor turned out to be kicked up by an antique Ford. A Model T, maybe? Very cool to see. And close by there, combines working in a field. The day was getting on now and the late-day sun was casting smoke-tinted amber light across the grain fields and reflecting off the the shallow waters of still-wet sloughs.
It lit up the lodged-over grain on the drylands fields and the the tall, thick, still-standing stalks on the irrigated land. A whitetail doe paused to look at me from one field and down the road near a deeper pond, midges danced in the warm, still, summer-evening air as the sun set and the day was done.
But as I sat editing the pictures the next day, I kept thinking that if the countryside looks this nice in the last half of the day, it would be even more lovely in the first half. So the next morning, just before sunrise, I headed out again.
I picked a different direction this time, though. Much as I like the country to the east, the country directly north of the city is beautiful as well. So with the sun hanging like a red ball in the morning sky, that’s where I went.
This is much wetter country than out east, especially in the rolling hills west of Airdrie. So it was no surprise when I found the mist. Putting up the little copter for a look I could see that every little pond was shrouded in it and from there it was making its way through the valleys between them.
The air was almost completely still and sound carried from everywhere. Barking dogs, calling geese, cattle mooing, planes passing overhead, cars heading to town, all the morning sounds mixed into a misty soup. There were hawks wheeling overhead - some many hawks around right now - and geese flying by. And down in a nearby pasture, one grumpy cow.
She could have shared with the sheep, she could have allowed them a lick or two of her salt block, but no, she wanted it all to herself. Cows can be so rude.
Up the road from them I found a pair of trumpeter swans having breakfast in a weedy pond and just to the east of there, a young coot trying to balance itself as it walked along a log. The mist had gone now, evaporated again into the warming air, but the countryside still looked lovely so I kept rolling on.
East seemed to be a good direction so that’s where I went, first following the Crossfield Creek valley and then cutting north a bit over to the upper Rosebud River. But as I crossed the deep, green coulee it had carved for itself, I remembered some other ponds that I hadn’t checked for a while so popped up there.
These ponds are fed by springs and flowing creeks so though they were less full than they otherwise might have been thanks to the dry winter and spring, the summer rains had mostly maintained their levels. Now, just like the ponds further east, they were covered with water birds, ducks, geese, coots, herons, shorebirds, young of the year and adults.
The shallower ponds held more of the same but they had the advantage of being, well, more photogenic. One pond by Sunnyslope was a nearly perfect mirror, the water reflecting the young geese standing ankle-deep in it and the barley field beyond. Tiny teal and young mallards swam through the reflections.
Somehow I’d ended up close to Linden so I stopped in to pick up some Mennonite sausage and a couple of fresh pastries for the road before following the Kneehill Creek valley. Amazingly, the valley is still quite green so, once again, I launched my little drone to see it from above.
From up high you can really see how the creek has meandered back and forth over the centuries, carving new channels for itself and cutting off old ones. There really is no such thing as a straight stream. There were cattle in one bend and beyond the creek valley, more ripening fields. Truly beautiful country up here.
It was getting on to lunch time now, the sun rising high in the sky and the light starting to flatten out so I started making my way back to town. I passed more sloughs full of ducks and more fields heavy with ripening grain. Near Acme I found a farmer harvesting peas so when he got close, I signalled that I’d like to take some pictures and he gave me the thumbs-up.
I shot the peas churning out of the combine’s auger into a waiting truck and then, once again, launched the little drone for an overhead view. Dust and chaff flew out of the combine’s straw walker while the pickup churned and fed the pea plants into its maw. From above I could see the hopper filling as the combine gnawed its way along.
But the drone’s battery was winding down so I flew it back and kept on rolling down the road. The sun was nearly straight overhead now, casting short, harsh shadows. This is gorgeous country, true, but this kind of light isn’t all that flattering. So I headed on back to town.
But I had seen what I had come to see, first in the lovely light of late day and evening and then in the gorgeous glow of a summer morning. And once again I came to the same conclusion that I have come to many, many times before.
Now matter what the time of day, late or early - or even in between - southern Alberta is absolutely beautiful.