Alberta Foothills Weather

With nothing much happening around here this afternoon, we headed off to check out the local rivers and see what was up before levels start dropping again. Lots of trees floating down them, but nothing terribly exciting after seeing the carnage of 2005. The floodgates are wide open at Dickson Dam, everything going into Gleniffier Lake is pouring out, and the levels downstream near Innisfail were up quite a bit today. The only excitement at the Little Red Deer river on Cottonwood road was a big tree floating past with some half-burnt campfire logs that may have come all the way from Water Valley. We trundled out to the Garrington bridge between Sundre and Gleniffer, the river is certainly full and moving fast, but again, compared to 2005, it’s nowhere close. Next stop was James River bridge, where the James River was moving right along but looked like the peak had passed already and the bridge was still there. On to the Raven River at Raven which had spilled over into some low lying farmland north of town, but was still well within it’s banks everywhere else we could see it. Another day of rain and we may have had some problems.

While on our little tour, a line of low precip storms formed up for us to watch between stops. Just a few degrees warmer and we may have had something nice cook up, but the lighting and structure made up for it.