Spring Trip 2010 - Day 12 Part 1 - Dinosaur Provincial Park

Now, a note to all of you who have been following the saga of my desktop computer - it is home, it is sitting here on the floor, but since it now has to be started from scratch again, I am waiting for a clear mind before attempting to even plug it in and starting to download programs into it etc. The problem, so I am told, was a faulty 'Mother Board', a once in a million occurrence. Said 'Mother Board' has now been replaced....so we shall see!

Now back to the trip. Monday, May 3, we once again woke up to beautiful clear blue skies.
Since we had already decided to spend one more day here, we had a leisurely breakfast, sitting outside with our morning coffee. Ernie thought I should do the hike up behind the visitor's center with him. I was told it was a bit 'scrabbily' in parts, but was assured I could make it, and that the view was worth it, then if we left the dogs at home, we could check out the visitor's center and the gift shop. Ernie had taken Shantz with him when he went to the Self Registration station to pay for another night, and she, after all the exercise of the day before, didn't show much enthusiasm for more, and was quite happy to curl up in her kennel in the truck....

So after putting our hiking boots on (wanted sure footing in those 'scrabbily' parts!), we set off. Here are some of the cactus encountered along the way...in another months time they will all be in flower......

more of those Prairie Crocus......

and me down there taking pictures of them.......

a close up of 'twins'......

and another pair.......

this interesting little plant is called 'Hooker's Towsendia' I haven't been able to find a common name for it. My guide book shows it with white flowers but does say that it can also have pink flowers, which this one did. Only saw the one plant.....

There was lots more of that Moss Phlox that we'd seen at Chin Lake, growing up in this area.....

Here is a closer look.....

and now we are pretty much up on top....views not fully appreciated as my love of heights is basically none existent!

there were, indeed, 'scrabbily' places, in fact a few spots were, in my opinion, down right treacherous and I'm not sure why there aren't some warning signs in place regarding the difficulty of the walk ~ perhaps there are during tourist season.... I want you to pay attention to what is happening in the sky.......

and just keep it in mind. If I remember correctly from my school science lessons, clouds like this signify a change in the weather.....

The cloud was coming from the south, looking east....the sky was still nice and blue.... I should mention that the wind up here was pretty strong....another reason it was difficult to enjoy the view while perched on the edge.....

more of the badlands.....some areas of that gray stuff were wet and extreme caution was necessary because boy, was it slippery!!!

and one last one....the campground is down there in the middle in this picture.

So next we went to the visitor's center.....I took a few pictures.....there was nothing saying you couldn't....

One of the main displays.....

and another....

and a final one.... We then started talking to the attendant there, we asked about the lack of water being available and she said that there was supposed to be water at the sani dump ~ we assured here we had tried there and there wasn't, that there were no taps....so she phoned maintenance about that and then she told us there was a wind warning in effect for the area, with winds of up to 100 kph forecast, to start late in the afternoon, with rain, turning to snow, over night.....and it was like "What?!" The snow was supposed to end by noon the next day. Now what? She checked everything within a day's drive, east, west and north for us and everywhere the forecast was the same or worse. She said that the weather here had been beautiful, in April temperatures were in the 20's ~ at Easter the campground had been basically full ~ that this weather was NOT normal for this time of the year.

Well, first order of business, now we had this information was to change campsites as the one we were in was exposed, and as you've seen, under some pretty big old Poplar trees. In order to change sites we had to pack up, so decided we might as well make a run into Brooks (48 km each way) because we had an empty propane tank again (tanks in the camper aren't as large as the ones we had for the trailer and the furnace had been running pretty much none stop at night), so this we did. Picked up a loaf of bread, returned to the park, went to the dump station and dumped what we had in the tanks, and found that there were still no 'taps' but Ernie tried using pliers and lo and behold water gushed forth....so we were able to finally fill the water tank......

to be continued.....