Waterton Getaway

 I like to think that my friends and I do an annual weekend getaway in Waterton, but this is not technically true. At some point I convinced myself that it had been two years since I'd visited Ashley's Mountain View cabin, about 10 minutes outside of Waterton National Park. However a quick investigation into my photo archives proved that it had actually been three years since my last cabin visit. I'm amazed by how quickly time has flown!

After a 2 hour and 15 minute drive from the city, we arrived at Ashley's doorstep under blue skies and warm sunshine. It was impossible not to appreciate the rolling landscape.

Then we were treated to our first source of entertainment-- Ashley's neighbours herding their cattle down the road in front of the property.

Over the next few hours, the rest of our friends trickled in, and we entertained ourselves with a rousing game of drinking Jenga. This lead to the coining of the term, "Billy'd." It seemed like no matter what, Billy would always choose the most difficult Jenga piece to extract. So if you pulled a piece that made the tower structurally unstable, you "Billy'd" it. The most epic ending to the game came when Ashley tried to remove a Jenga piece with her toes. She was so close!

The next day we piled into cars and drove to Waterton to check out the town and the lake. It was extremely windy (I cannot stress this enough), and we all got gravel blasted when we were on the ridge by the Prince of Wales Hotel. Here are a few of the highlights from our daytrip, enhanced by my excessive use of Instagram!!!

A mangy looking Bighorn sheep.

Mountain views.

Billy to the rescue!

Choppy looking lake.

Tom and Amanda vs. the WIND

Getting misted by the falls.

And we ended the trip with a little good ol' fashion man-hunting.

As I'm sure you can understand, after all the excitement, Tom and I were a little tuckered out. We took a nap on the couch while Billy nursed his wounds, and everyone else played some low key card games.

The last sights from our trip included some large bird nests on telephone pole platforms along the highway. We saw several of these nests along the way, but this one was by far the largest, and both birds were home. If you look closely, you can see that there is garbage and toilet paper hanging out of the nest. We are pretty sure these are Osprey nests.

Mom and dad are home.

We also spotted a secondary nest about 100m away from the very large nest above. The nest was smaller and had a lot of stuff hanging off of it, but there were two birds at home in it as well.

A slightly crappier nest.

I'll try to make sure it's not another three years between visits!