Day 29 - Friday June 16/17

A day of touring today, based at Park Lake Provincial Park north of Lethbridge - to “Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump”, to the southwest, just west of Fort Macleod (see map).

A ‘not-rushed’ morning in camp, including breakfast of granola and yoghurt with apples and strawberries and raspberries (that did not land on the floor in yesterday’s mishap)- and, of course, coffee. And, we prepared a picnic of pasta salad, coleslaw, and cold deli chicken. We are currently grinding “Bear Claw” beans by Kicking Horse (a coffee roaster we plan to visit in B.C.; and the coffee we tend to use most often!)

Two notes of interest: A couple of days ago, while coming from a morning shower, Michael discovered that the front licence plate was gone from the truck; our theory is that is became loose and blew off while battling strong head-and-cross-winds across Manitoba/Saskatchewan.  A mystery.

The second thing - while Nancy was doing some online banking this morning, she discovered that $174,000 had been deposited into her account on June 8th. Suspecting that she does not have a ‘fairy godfather’, she called TD and reported the erroneous deposit. They are looking into it. She did feel rich for a minute or two. (Another mystery)

On the road to Head Smashed in at 10:30 under partly cloudy-partly sunny skies, temp 20c.

Travelled through flat farmland in SW Alberta - lots of use of irrigation around here - but the foothills of the Rockies were very visible all the way west. Snow was visible in some of the mountains beyond the foothills. First cuts of hay are visible; lots of wind turbines (we discovered that there are strong and mostly steady westerly winds here coming over the mountains, then the foothills, then the Porcupine Hills; sometimes gusting up to 150km/hr!).

Had a fabulous day at Head Smashed in Buffalo Jump - not only a National Historic Site (1968) and a Provincial Heritage Site ((1979), but also designated a U.N.E.S.C.O. World Heritage Site in 1981!

Head Smashed In is a cliff in the Porcupine Hills where indigenous peoples - various tribal groups, most recently Blackfoot - for at least 6000 years drove herds of buffalo (properly ‘bison’) to run headlong off the cliff and tumble to their deaths some 20 metres below, as part of their fall hunting, to gather enough food to last them through the winter.

Video: Prairie grasslands at the base of the Head Smashed In cliff 

An added bonus to the day was discovering that ‘bison burgers’ and ‘bison stew’ were on offer in the cafeteria, so that is what we had for lunch (we’ve been hoping to have a bison burger all through the Prairies!). (We kept our summer salads picnic for supper.)

The Interpretive Centre, designed by architect Robert LeBlond, is on six levels, built entirely into the hillside. He won a Governor General’s Award for architecture in 1990. 

On our hike on the trail around the base of the cliff, we again became aware of the wide variety of prairie wildflowers - and share some of them with you:

(A "prairie wildflower" of a different sort!)

On our way back to camp, we drove through historic Fort Macleod - and determined that we really do need to stop there on our way to Waterton Lakes on Sunday to take a closer look at the historic downtown Main Street and visit the NWMP historic site.

Upon returning to camp we napped, had a glass of wine, our summer salads picnic supper, and then wrote up blogs.

Tomorrow is our first scheduled ‘personal maintenance day’. Planning to get hair cuts, a facial for Nancy, and wash the truck. Lots of napping and reading as well.