A Taste Of Home
August 5, 2014 3:32 pm Leave your thoughts
This past month I was fortunate enough to get a taste from home. My older sister Jessie travelled to Grande Prairie from Toronto to visit me for a week. She flew in Wednesday night with a tent and her steel toes, ready to see what Alberta had to offer. Thursday Jessie came to work with me and met some of the tree planters. I gave her a tour of camp and explained the basics behind Weyerhaeuser’s reforestation requirements. After we threw some plots, she received a quick demonstration of how to properly plant a tree and then gave it a try. At the end of the day we both decided that cutting down trees for our sawmill is significantly easier than planting them. It probably didn’t help that we were in a cut block with hard ground and a lot of competition. However we couldn’t complain too much as most of the plants coming up in the block were wild strawberries.
The next day Jessie and I travelled to Grande Cache for a white water rafting trip with Wild Blue Yonder. We rafted down the Sulphur and Smoky Rivers and it was a blast! The Sulphur was full of rapids with amazing views and the Smoky was an ice-cold glacial fed river. We had a riverside picnic, which thankfully included hot chocolate because it was a really cold, rainy day. Despite that it was one of the best things I’ve done out west. The Wild Blue Yonder guides were hilarious and from all over: Australia, Chile, Holland, you name it. We finished off the day in Grande Cache with some light hiking; surprisingly an entire day of white water rafting is very exhausting!
Me getting a wave to the face before Jessie fell in.
She was still all smiles after being dunked.
Saturday we visited downtown Grande Prairie for a giant street performers festival. There was tons of acrobatic tricks, pogo flips, face painting, overall a great community event. We then went to Saskatoon Island, a nearby provincial park, to camp for the night. Originally we were going to head to Jasper for the weekend but with the forest fires it unfortunately didn’t work out. But that just means if I’m out west next summer she’ll have to venture back out for round 2!
Cheers, Brooke