On the Road: While exploring uncharted territory, surprises await

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Those gnarly old tree roots just didn’t look as good this time.

When I’d last stopped by this old beaver pond back in December of last year it had been frozen over and the roots were casting long and kinda spooky shadows on the snow. Now, while still very nice, they were, I dunno, kinda bland.

But the day itself, fortunately, was far from bland.

I’d headed out a bit after sunrise — which is happening later and later these days — and rolled north and west into the hills around Cremona and Sundre. The morning was bright and calm, a bit cool but pleasant, the morning sun bright and highlighting the foliage along the road and making it glow. And it especially glowed by a little spring-fed pond near Bergen.

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The clear water was burbling, little gnats were spinning around, the leaves were backlit and bright. Aspens and poplars, wispy grass and stiff sedges all caught the sun and glowed against the shadowed background. The pond’s surface sparkled where tiny currents kicked the light around.

This was another place that I’ve visited in the winter and it is just as pretty then, the bare branches where these bright green leaves are now, covered with spiky frost crystals and the water, never freezing because of the relative warmth it carries up from the ground, topped by a thin layer of silvery mist. Such a lovely place. I love to revisit it.

From there I continued west across Fallen Timber Creek and up to a tall ridge that overlooks the Red Deer River valley just to the north. Last December I could see over to Sundre across the snowy fields but today a soft haze limited the view. A bit of smoke, maybe? Or just a light morning mist. Anyway, no views.

So I continued on, following the contour of the ridge and angling back southward along roughly the same route as I had back in December. The fields and forests were lush with late-summer growth and the roadsides full of magenta-blossomed thistles and red rose hips, some nearly as big as crab apples. Asters were everywhere.

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The roads I was on were the same as those from last winter but now that they weren’t snow-covered, I pushed on a little farther than I had before. And I found some new country.

I often brag there isn’t a road in southern Alberta I haven’t been on but though that’s not far from the truth, there are a few I haven’t explored completely. This road I found myself on was one of them and it led me down into the Nitchi Creek valley.

The creek itself is tiny but it runs through a valley surrounded by forest that opens up into a wide grassland. I found whitetail deer peering out from among the spruces and hundreds of butterflies and bees among the asters and thistles along the creek bottom. Over in the open part of the valley, a quartet of horses were gathered in the shade of a stand of poplars.

They looked sleek and healthy so they could have belonged to a nearby ranch but wild horses roam all through this area, so they could have been feral, too. Whatever, it was interesting to see them clustered like that.

I had hoped this road might connect to another that would take me south, but it was a dead-end, so I rolled back the next intersection. And passed another landmark I remembered from the winter.

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This one was an old corral with a tumbled down log house — or maybe a barn — just beyond. I don’t usually stop to take pictures of old buildings and hadn’t last winter, but this one had something interesting.

Vines were crawling around an open window and over the wall. It didn’t look like clematis, our most common vine, and it certainly wasn’t ivy because, well, it just doesn’t grow here. But through my long lens — and a few minutes later, with my drone — I could see it was hops.

At some point a homesteader must have planted it, maybe to use in home-brew beer, and now it was taking over the old building. Pretty cool. I wish I could have gone and plucked a couple of blossoms. I love that smell.

Just down the road from there I found my gnarly old tree roots, still in the same spot as they had likely been for decades. They looked just like they had in the winter but now they were standing in water full of duckweed and floating mats of algae. Lovely but not quite as dramatic as they had looked last December. I took a couple of pictures and then headed on by. There were other places I wanted to re-visit down the road, but I’d give the roots another look on the way back.

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A few kilometres past the roots, the road bisects a fairly big bog lined with black spruce covered with willows. This was about as far as I went along this road last winter and I wanted to poke around it now that everything was thawed but I also wanted to go farther down this road to see what else I could find.

And what I found was a bit of a surprise.

Surrounded by untouched forest, a small area of trees right beside the road had, at some point, burned. There was no other fire damage around it but this patch of ground maybe 300 metres square was covered with scorched spruce trees, both standing and flat on the ground, showing where a mini forest fire had raged.

It couldn’t have happened all that long ago — lightning strike, maybe — but the standing trees were shedding their burned bark and I could see some of them had recently toppled. But the most interesting part was all the new growth around them.

Asters were everywhere, hundreds of them, their pale blue petals and bright yellow centres looking skyward from among the fire’s leavings. In the quiet among them I could hear a constant buzzing of bees and hoverflies going from blossom to blossom and the tapping of woodpeckers high on the standing trunks.

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What a gorgeous patch of devastation now springing back to life. Very cool.

Back at the bog I tried, unsuccessfully, to snag a photo of one of the dozens of dragonflies rattling around and then put up the little drone to revisit the bog like I had last winter. The round pond out in the middle was now patched with pond lilies and surrounded by willows and islands of trees that had been snow-covered before while the wet ditches were full of brown water, sedges, dead insects and floating prismatic patches of what will some day be oil.

Some pretty little bog flowers, too, but as I poked around a light drizzle started to fall as the clouds I’d photographed earlier were coalescing into a nascent thunderstorm. So it was back to the roots.

I managed to fly my little drone and aim its camera at roughly the same angle toward the roots that I had when the pond was frozen. Easy.

But without that snow cover to catch the shadows — of which there were none at the moment anyway — the view just wasn’t the same. Had I not shot here before, I might have been satisfied with what I got but, honestly, the photos just didn’t work.

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So I moved on.

A breeze had come up along with the drizzle and I could see more clouds moving in as I rolled south. But not very far down the road, I came to a spot where it crossed a continuation of the bog I had just left behind. It looked completely different here, so I stopped again.

Here the water had accumulated enough that it was running as a flowing stream — Fair Creek, according to my map app — and the area was more marsh than bog. Cattails and hundred of tall, yellow-flowered plants — nodding beggartick, maybe? — lined the banks. A family of mallards, the babies about half grown, paddled out into the open water and away upstream while another small brown bird patrolled the far shore.

It was a sora rail, one of the few of these secretive marsh birds I’ve seen this year. I didn’t get a great picture but, gotta say, it was more satisfying than any of the root ones I’d come here for.

I was nearly back to the Little Red Deer River watershed, west of Cremona and north of Water Valley, so I continued on as the clouds built up. A few raindrops were falling as I crossed Fallen Timber Creek and then paused on a hillside above Big Prairie Creek to aim my camera back toward the mountains rising blue in the distance. Close by, a momma kingbird fed her baby what looked like a raspberry. Silly me, I thought they just ate bugs.

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Down below me were aspens, poplars and spruce, all in varying shades of green. A month from now that will be a different story. Those poplars and aspens will be shades of yellow instead of green as summer winds down and autumn begins.

Signs of which were already starting to appear.

In the narrow valley where Little Dogpound Creek begins, just beyond a startled whitetail doe that stopped mid-munch to stare at me, I found a hillside covered with yellow leaves.

It was a patch of dogbane, the pretty pink flowers now long gone and the leaves among the first to turn yellow. It was pretty, undeniably, but an encounter a little too soon for my taste.

For now and for the next pretty good while, it is still summer and, though I enjoy fall, I’m happy for that.

After fall comes winter and that means snow and cold. Maybe just like I had last December. Not something I’m truly looking forward to.

But I’ll watch for that and when it inevitably happens, I think I have a picture in mind.

This December, I’ll try again to get back to my roots again.

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