For my annual (slightly belated) birthday excursion we headed off along the backroads complete with my nifty new GPS; destination Horsefly. Around noon we were at Hendrix Lake, and decided to check out the community. It seems to be a modern-day ghost town...the general store's roof had caved in long ago, and the lakefront row of cookie-cutter cottages circa 1940's were long abandoned. A couple of them look as though they may be used for summer homes. We saw no evidence that anyone had been there all winter, except that the roads were all well plowed. There is tons of snow up that way still. There's an abandoned mine nearby apparently, so we're thinking the community more or less died with the mine's closure. Something to research for sure.

Past Hendrix Lake, the road got worse (as in unplowed and melty) and we would have turned around and gone back had there been anywhere we could have done so. (There was still about three feet of snow on the ground in some areas!)The road was in terrible shape for about 10 kilometers, but conditions got better eventually, and we reached snow-free Horsefly without further incident. It is a depressed looking little community, and though it's probably quite pretty in the summer, it was looking a little bleak.

We saw a just-born black angus calf with its mother still licking it dry. We saw the Horsefly fire department tending a badly escaped grass fire. We saw tons of water birds, millions of robins and juncos, several hawks, and a grouse standing in the middle of the road that we had to stop for.

Elbow Lake, between Hendrix Lake and Horsefly




A lovely old barn near Horsefly. The bay mare by the barn was heavily in foal.
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Yesterday we spent the day working at home. Mike took down about 10 dead pines. We had a good fire going, and by early afternoon had burned everything we're not keeping for firewood. The warm weather for the last couple of days has melted most of our remaining snow. There's lots of standing water, but luckily it's all well away from the areas we use.