We are heading out on a 5-6 week road trip into the American mid-west.  John has booked two week-long stays with our time shares; one in Branson, Missouri and one in Pagosa Springs, Colorado.  Yesterday we headed south to Nelson for the first night amid thick smoke all day.  I even wore my mask in the truck.

We only stopped to find a few caches since I didn’t want to be out in the smoke for very long.  And, besides, we have been over these roads many times before and seen many of the spots of interest.

At  Half Mile Creek while John was signing the geocache log  I went for a little walk up a trail and saw this tumbling creek.

We took a little detour down, almost, to Edgewood to find a that cache was hidden near the lake shore at and we saw this little waterfall.Smoke was pretty thick everywhere. This was taken overlooking the lake at the Edgewood cache.These boys were doing a combination of fishing and kayaking.Today we had stopped at Stewart Creek rest stop and walked up to the little waterfall. When we got back to the truck John brought up the geocache map on his phone thinking it was a likely spot for a cache.  He was right.  So back up to the waterfall we went to find it. We decided it would be a good idea to get out of the truck about once an hour so each hour I would bring up the map and see where a cache was located near the road up ahead.  It worked well to get us out and moving about for a few minutes every once in awhile.  There are hundreds and hundreds of caches in the Kootenay area. We will have to come back and do a caching holiday sometime.

Even after we traveled through the Crow’s Nest pass to the other side of the mountains we still had smoke.  I took a few pictures of the mountains through the window but the smoke haze made most of them look pretty faded. We stopped again at the Frank Slide site as we often do when we go over this road. It is amazing to think that such a huge piece of the mountain broke off in one piece and tumbled down onto the town.  The boulders that were created when the limestone hit the valley bottom are huge and over 150′ deep.  The sound could be heard for miles.   We arrived in Lethbridge at 7 o’clock Alberta time, had dinner, found our hotel and settled in for the night.  Tomorrow, once we get to Gull Lake past Medicine Hat we plan to drop south onto some of the smaller roads and go about half-way across Saskatchewan.  We’ll see how far we get.  Perhaps we will leave the smoke behind at last.