A rest day hike at Writing On Stone park (resting from driving)

Morning at the campground beach

It was a beautiful sunny day here, down to 9C overnight (forecast was for 3 and chance of frost), and going up to 20C in the afternoon, with a light breeze. 

We weren't in a hurry to get started this morning, but did get sorted by mid morning and went for a hike on the main trail along the Milk river. The whole Matapiiksi (Hoodoo) Trail is about 5 km return. We hiked the main part, about 3.5 km return. It's not just a straight trail hike.

This is an area with a long history with Indigenous people. This weekend the campground is hosting activities as part of National Indigenous Peoples Day on June 21. It's fully booked, so we'll be leaving tomorrow morning.

I don't have much description to add to the pictures, but hopefully they will give you a sense of the terrain. 

The trail winds its way around and through many of the rocks

Rock art images are faintly visible across the central flat rock

See the face profile looking over the Milk River here?

Similar to City of Rocks State Park in New Mexico, your imagination can be inspired by the many different shapes in the rocks.

Apparently the valley was carved by glacier activity, and the smallish river came through afterwards.

 

More faint rock art in the image above. Best guess is that the images were made 1000-2000 years ago.

 

After the hike we were quite happy to sit in the shade this afternoon, listening to the "singing" of this robin. It's a territorial thing I guess, since our robin was trading insults and threats with another robin not too far away, for hours on end. He seemed to want to be close to us while he did it, maybe for moral support:

One of the many deer in the area wandered through our site this afternoon too:

 

When driving over the past few days, we've had to be very alert for deer. They popped out a number of times with little warning. This was the middle of the day too, not evening or early morning when you'd expect more deer traffic. Nice to see in the campground though, or along the trail like we saw today too.