The sky didn’t look too bad. Kinda pretty, actually. There were big fluffy clouds drifting along, flat-bottomed with bouffant tops.
Behind them, the sky was a soft blue. There was a bit of wind but just barely enough to ruffle the water on my favourite bisected slough just east of Strathmore. On one side, the blackbirds were calling and a pair of geese were paddling around while on the other side, cattle were wading udder-deep into the muddy water.
Last fall, this part of the slough was nearly dry but now, thanks to the springtime rain and snow, there were ducks swimming around among the wading cattle with killdeers and snipe along the shore. Doesn’t mean there isn’t still a potential drought but nice to see. Speaking of droughts, I was heading over to the valley in between the Chimney Hills north of Standard and the Wintering Hills south of Dalum to see if all the rain and snow we had this spring had refilled the shallow sloughs over that way.
The last time I had been out there, they were pretty much dry. So I left the muddy cattle and rolled east through the greening farmland onto the western edge of the Chimney Hills where I stopped for a minute to take pictures of the hawthorn blossoms glowing yellowish-white among stands of saskatoons. Looking back west from where I had stopped, I could see those clouds I’d admired back closer to Strathmore were thicker now, still roughly the same shape but more numerous and crowding against each other.
Off to the northwest there.
