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Summer at last!

Albertans seem to measure — and some end — their outdoor lives on long weekends.
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Bob Scammell enjoys nature at its finest while testing his new streamside bench among lush brush

Albertans seem to measure — and some end — their outdoor lives on long weekends.

Whether you call it “Bank ‘oliday Monday,” as my dad used to, or “Heritage Day,” as we do now, it produces one of the more interesting of our four “summer” long weekends.

Face it, for the last several years the May and July “longs,” particularly the most recent ones, have been basically busts, unless you are into “mud bogging” with off-road vehicles, including ATVs, or pot-hunting for mushrooms, which some of us do when rivers and streams are too high, muddy, and cold for fishing.

But this year, the early August long weekend seemed finally to be the start of summer, sunny and hot, and Albertans were seriously out and about trying to enjoy what they have been missing.

In and just out of Calgary, rafters by the thousands were cooling off on the Bow and Elbow Rivers and routinely breaking the law and the rules of common sense and safety, particularly the one that makes me shudder: roping several rafts together and thus creating a life-threatening hazard to all in the tethered rafts at bridge abutments and from sweepers, and also posing a dangerous hazard to the navigation of other rafters.

Officers handed out many summonses for liquor infractions, no life jackets and littering, and dry-docked some floaters who were seriously intoxicated. Basically, officers said, it wasn’t too bad and it seems to be getting better as rafters — maybe — are getting the message.

All reports are not yet in, but, province-wide, the usual long weekend carnage seems to be down: two drownings in the south at Cavan Lake and on the Oldman River, and one ATV death at Big Horn Dam when an operator, riding at night, went over a cliff.

Out and around the Stump Ranch south of Rocky Mountain House, things were far busier than on the May and July “longs.” The random-camping motor-home urban slum beside an old gravel pit on Crown land had overflowed onto a wide spot on the trail somewhat closer to Strubel Lake.

When I was “fishing for my country” at the World Fly Fishing Tournament in England in 1987, I became so enthralled by the riverside benches that my friend, Ken Short, installed some so I could sit and gaze at some of my favourite water on my home stream. But those succumbed to the “200-year flood” in 2005. A major project for this weekend was my “fitting” by Ken of two magnificent new replacement benches.

While we were thus engaged, the first angler of the season wandered along, and reported some success fishing hopper patterns, not surprising considering that there seems to be a bumper crop of hoppers coming along.

Later in the day, sun lowering, I was studying a favourite pool from one of the new benches, sipping an ale and remembering that when the streamside hayfields are cut in a few days there will likely be, as there has frequently been in the past, at least a “hatch,” or even a “grasshopper wind” of evicted hoppers that will cause a trout feeding frenzy.

The forest understory is higher and thicker this year than I can ever remember. This is prime browse to the deer and, as a result, the does are fat and sleek and their fawns bigger than they usually are at this time of year.

It may seem like the first days of summer, but the signs are there that summer is actually ending and fall is on its way. Wildflowers are ending the spring-summer colour phases of yellow, orange, pink and red, and the late summer and fall colours of blues, purples and violets are coming on: bluebells, fireweed and asters.

Out here, aspen parkland meets and mixes with boreal forest, creating a rich habitat for a wide variety of fungi, wild mushrooms, all interesting, most just not worth harvesting for a variety of reasons, some absolutely safe and delicious and, fortunately, a very few that are deadly poisonous.

That environment is especially rich after all the rain we have had and the fall mushrooms, the reds, are now “on.” We enjoyed a risotto made with a batch of prime and mostly button aspen boletes, Leccinum insigne, Alberta’s “mushroom emblem.”

The undergrowth is now so thick that even red or blaze orange mushrooms are hard to see. Easiest to find are the infuriatingly abundant Russula emetica, The Sickener, but I was unable to find even one of the deadly poisonous fly agaric, Amanita muscaria, even in patches where a few faithfully pop up every year at this time, red-capped with white flecks, looking exactly like the mushrooms so often pictured, often with toads sitting on top, in children’s books of fables.

The problem with Alberta’s choice of mushroom emblem is how easily it can be mistaken for these latter two, one dangerous and the other deadly, fall “reds.”

Bob Scammell is an award-winning outdoors writer living in Red Deer.