Saturday, August 28, 2010

Visiting Ella and More Mountains

Friday dawned bright and early with Miss Ella coming to spend the day with us. Her mother had to work and we managed to kidnap her for the day from her daycare so she could spend the day entertaining Meg and us.

Walking Grandma-1

Ella and Meg-1 Two of my favourite girls

After she took Grandma for a walk and spent a little time sharing Megs bed she did a little snuggling. That was Friday a kind of all Ella day.

Saturday we took a spin out the David Thompson highway west of Rocky Mountain House towards Banff National Park. We thought we might be able to find a new place to take our horses too. Not sure if that will happen as it is a little hard to get our outfit into some of the spots but there is some beautiful scenery out that way. Might take a little work to figure out where the trails are in this new country but then that is half the fun. Here is the view from one spot called Preachers Point.

Preachers Point-1 Preachers Point-1-1

On the way we ran through a burn on the east side of the Park boundary and it was already alive with regrowth. I am not sure whether it was a natural burn or a prescribed fire but nevertheless I am sure that Kootenay Plains at the head of the Abraham Lake reservoir is used to fire helping fashion the ecosystem.

The shot below is for Rod and his comment the other day on our small square bales. In our country we bale them the way the market likes them. Bales that are fed to our local livestock are usually the large round bales, but the timothy hay we grow is in demand around the world and it is easier to ship the small square bales. They actually compress them down to about half the size at our local hay plant and then ship them in containers overseas and into the southern states.

Round Bales-1

4 comments:

  1. Interesting info on the hay bales. Who knew?

    What a precious child. Thanks for sharing the pics of her.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Now that looks more like the bales we produce down here. And yes we had to sack up some weird sizes of soybeans and pack them in shipping containers for the Japanese. I think they were 25 kilo sacks separated by paper pallets. We grew the seed they specified from start to finish. Some finicky folks, those Japanese.
    Miss Ella is a doll!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Loved the shot of Brenda and Ella snuggling--what a gorgeous child! We sure are trying to get Mike healed so we can head your way with Gina and Rollie.

    ReplyDelete
  4. You certainly have some gorgeous scenery in your neck of the woods! :)

    ReplyDelete