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I had kinda forgotten how loud thunder is.
I mean, I hadn’t heard any for the better part of nine months so as I was sitting in the truck with the rain hammering down and concentrating on the pictures I was taking, that first nuclear blast of thunder really startled me. The next rumble wasn’t quite as heart-racing and by the time I heard the third and fourth, it was just part of the overall stormy ambience.
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To tell you the truth, those sounds — or more accurately, those sights — were the reason I was here on a ridge west of Trochu. I had checked the weather forecast earlier in the day and saw that thunderstorms were predicted. Nice change from yet another wintery blast of snow, I thought, so I headed that direction.
Wouldn’t have guessed anything like that was in the offing as I rolled north and east. The sky was blue with just a few wispy clouds and though the morning was chilly, it was getting warmer as I drove along.
There was still a bit of snow in the ditches and a few of the ponds were covered with ice but mostly, the countryside looked like it usually does at this time of year. The fields were muddy and covered with stubble bleached by months of winter sun. Pastures were mostly brown but with little patches of new green growth that the gophers were gobbling down.
Flocks of geese and other birds were flying everywhere and pretty much every meltwater pond I passed had birds splashing around. Huge white tundra and trumpeter swans were gathered in the stubble around the puddles while wigeons and pintails dabbled in the shallow water.
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There were white-fronted geese here, too, the first I’ve seen this year. They are particularly handsome birds with their soft chocolaty bodies, white face masks and orange bills and feet. In the air, they look sort of like Canada geese, though they’re much smaller. No honking from these guys, though. They peep and chirp like sparrows.
But nice as it was to see them, I couldn’t help but notice most of them were on the ephemeral ponds. A good part of the reason for that is the roots and sprouting grain left behind by the combines is easy to get at there. Another reason, though, is that a lot of the more permanent ponds were nearly dry.
The biggest ones still had water but ones like a favourite slough near Sunnyslope were barely even muddy. There was water where a dugout had been carved years ago but otherwise, nothing.
But Three Hills and Kneehill Creeks were running pretty full, at least for the moment, and the parkland country a bit further north was full of still-frozen but watery potholes. The migrating birds will still have a few places to stop for a rest on their way north. Hopefully there will still be some for their autumn trip back.
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After a quick stop in Linden for some pastry treats, I continued on north to the ridge west of Trochu and then east again toward Huxley. The sky here, though still predominantly blue, was beginning to fill with thickening clouds and though most were puffy and benign-looking, several had those flat, windswept tops and dark bottoms that rain clouds often get.
But nothing was happening yet so I continued on east to Dry Island Buffalo Jump.
And hit the first rain.
It wasn’t a particularly hard rain, more of a shower, really, but it was coming in nearly sideways pushed by a gusty north wind. It was like Hollywood rain, you know, that rain you see in movies that falls from sprinklers on an obviously sunny day. This rain was coming from a cloud off to my left maybe a kilometre away and was being shoved by the wind over to the sunny road I was driving on.
But it didn’t last long. By the time I got to the edge of the cliff at Dry Island, both the rain and the wind had stopped and I could walk over and sit on the escarpment rim in comfort.
I never get tired of the view here. The eroded badlands on the south-facing slopes run into copses of birch and aspen that alternate with sagebrush and cactus down to the Red Deer River while the north-facing slopes are covered with spruce and poplar, more like a foothills forest than something along a prairie stream.
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And above it all sits that big inverted bowl of southern Alberta sky. A southern Alberta sky that on this day was starting to fill with ominous clouds. There was more wind and rain on the way.
But it wasn’t quite here yet so I drove on into the aspen-covered hills to the north.
The clouds were really beginning to churn now, some bubbling up into thunderheads while others stretched out and draped curtains of falling rain below them. The temperature rose and fell with the wind, a lovely 12C back by Dry Island dropping to 4C just a few kilometres away.
Stopping to take pictures of the clouds rolling over an old farmstead, I felt it change as the wind blew in and so did a goose perched on the farmhouse roof. I could see it crouch down behind the chimney as the gusts hit. A robin down the road perched on a fencepost just long enough for me to get a couple of pictures before diving into the grass to escape the oncoming rain.
Rain that quit almost immediately. The jackrabbit giving me the hairy eyeball from a stand of willows just a few hundred metres away was sitting in grass that hadn’t been touched by the rain at all while over at Elnora — such a pretty little town — the clouds were building up and starting to churn again.
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But not as much as they were over to the west.
After a quick stop in town, I headed back out into the hills to take advantage of the brief patches of sun that appeared between the stormy clouds. The aspens are really starting to get silvery now and from up on one of the ridges I could look down and across a broad valley toward the Huxley Hutterite Colony and see their shimmering shapes below.
But it was the sky beyond that really caught my attention. I’d come out this way kinda hoping I was going to run into a storm. Looked like I was about to.
I drove on a little further to where I could get a more open view and as I did the sky got darker and darker. By the time I stopped near a stubble field to take a few pictures, the clouds had deepened to a cobalt blue that was nearly black. The wind turbines on the ridge — the same ridge I’d crossed in warm sunshine a few hours before — were bright against the darkness and I could see their huge vanes spinning in the wind.
It looked like a mean one. So, naturally, I headed straight for it.
The wind hit me just as I crossed the highway and the first raindrops spattered the windshield about halfway up the ridge. But the time I got to the top, the rain was sheeting and the wind gusts were rocking the truck. Here, though, I was just on the edge of it all. Looking back east I could see patches of blue sky through the windswept curtains of precipitation.
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Which was why the sight of the swans was such a surprise.
There was a couple dozen of them in a field beside the road and they seemed in no hurry to go anywhere. The wind was ruffling their feathers so hard it was sending snowflake-like handfuls of loose ones spinning across the field as the rain hammered down but even though the storm’s edge was close by, they seemed determined to stay put. So I rolled down the window to shoot a few pictures.
And nearly dropped the camera as a loud bang shook the truck.
The lightning must have gone cloud-to-cloud because I never saw any flash but given the intensity of the sound, it had to have been close. Shoving my heart back down my throat, I looked up at the sky — what I expected to see, I don’t know — and then back to the swans.
They seemed just as shaken as I had been but they still weren’t ready to fly off.
A few minutes later another blast of thunder roared through, this one not quite as loud, but a brief brightness in the clouds gave away of its coming. The swans didn’t react at all.
The wind continued to howl as I drove on through the storm. Rain slashed across the road, turning it into a slurry but that was soon replaced by soft hail that cooled the windshield so much that I had to put the heater on defrost to see where I was going.
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As to where I was, I wasn’t entirely sure so I pulled over beside a slough to check the map on my phone. The lightning still wasn’t hitting the ground but flashes lit the clouds and the thunder continued to boom. The rain that had become hail had now turned to sleet that built up on the side windows and I could hear it slide off and splatter beside the truck as I sat there.
The map said I was between Trochu and Three Hills and that there was a paved road not far away. Normally I’m all about the back roads but with the slush building up and the mud underneath, I wanted off.
Pavement under the wheels again, I headed west past Torrington and out of the path of the storm. Back east it was still raging, the sky a deep grey from this angle, but here, everything was dry. So I turned back onto the gravel.
The storm caught up with me again 10 minutes later, this time as I sat beside a corn field full of swans and ducks. First came the wind, then the rain, then the sleet. The swans, imperturbable as they are, just sat there and let it blow. Me, I took a few pictures and moved on.
Yeah, I’d gone out that way hoping to run into a storm and, now that I had, I was pretty much done with it. But this is just the start of thunderstorm season and I know there will be many more of these storms to come.
So will I go out to meet them again? Oh my, yes I will!
But next time maybe I won’t be so startled.
Because I remember, now, just how loud thunder can be.
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