Bulldozers, Hoodoos, and Lunar Landscapes

I've been fortunate enough to be invited to housesit near Nelson, British Columbia, every other year. I usually drive straight through with just one overnight stop, but this year I decided to take it slowly and visit some parks along the way.

After 4-5 hours of driving past fields of flax, canola, and oil wells, it's surprising to see evergreen-covered hills in the distance and to arrive in the forests of Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park. The wildflowers were stunning, and I definitely plan to come back.

My next stop was Red Rock Coulee near Medicine Hat, Alberta. Again, you're driving through fields lined with bales of hay when you head up a short hill and spy a maze of dry stream beds with large, round, red boulders scattered over the slopes. The ground was covered with fine white gravel and it truly felt like I could be on the moon.

I had already headed off the main road to reach Red Rock, so I continued along secondary highways to my next destination, Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park. The secondary roads were in good condition and I was speeding along nicely until I reach highway 61. Signs said it was under construction, but that didn't worry me too much. I expected a few stretches of single-lane traffic with a pilot car to guide us through. No such luck! I ended up traversing 4 stretches of active construction with a bulldozer working on one side of me and a truck dumping gravel on the other. There I was trying to follow bulldozer tracks through churned-up lumps of dry dirt and wondering if I'd get stuck or what damage I was doing to the undercarriage. It was hair-raising, but my brave little car and I made it through unscathed!

Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park is another magical landscape where water and time have sculpted the landscape into long stretches of hoodoos following a curving river bed. It was so much fun to follow the trails and admire the hoodoos from every possible direction.

This is a sacred site for the Blackfoot First Nation and you can still catch glimpses of the petroglyphs they carved many years ago.

I spent two nights in Beaver Mines near Pincher Creek and spent a happy couple of hours wandering the trails around Beauvais Lake.

There were so many different wildflowers and - even better - a pair of loons calling on the lake.

I'm now on the east shore of Kootenay Lake - lakes, mountains, chicory, and cedar and the satisfaction of returning to one of my special places.

I'll take the ferry later today to my housesit on the west side of the lake near Nelson.