Up at 7AM on the road at 8 to the Chuck Wagon for Breakfast….hearty breakfast….a spot favored by the locals, then a quick stop at the Coyote Moon to fill AM, JR & MS’s thermos. Driving out of Turner Valley thru vast areas of ranch land, we were searching for Sheep Creek, when MS spotted the biggest deer he’d ever seen, a Muley, at least a 10 point!!  Stopping by Sheep Creek, we frothed the water for a short while with JR and AM hooking up with small rainbows.

Crossing a "Texas Gate" (that’s what they call cattle guards here), we stopped at a fishing access at the Kananaskis county line and looked at the hills across the road where we spotted a mom Black Bear with two cubs.

She was working her way down the hill toward us. Hummm….time to move on. As we drove down to the river we spotted a cowboy moving a herd of cattle toward the river. MS, GK & AB walked down a trail to check out the river; on the way back up the trail the entire herd of cattle were crashing thru the brush toward us.

When the cows saw us on the trail, they all freaked and stampeded back out toward the wrangler. He yelled, "Get off the trail!", which we did. Some of the cattle turned and headed toward the river, while other scattered thru the brushy bottomland. To say the least the cowboy wasn’t happy. We did talk to him later, we told him about the black bear just behind us across the road. He said the black bears weren’t bad, it was the Grizzly’s across the river that had chased him three times in the last couple weeks that were a pain. Seems when Fish & Game finds an unruly Griz near Lake Louise, they’d trap / dart them and dump them off in this area! Sheep Creek was pretty low & the cattle stampede didn’t help fishing much, but JR did catch one nice Rainbow.

We decided to head out to the Highwood River at 11:05. South on the Forest Trunk Highway we stopped at the High Country Camping store for lunch. A group of fire fighters were playing Texas Hold’um on a picnic table. AM caught a big fish on the Highwood, GK & MS both had fish on, but did an LDR. The river looked great, but the fishing was pretty slow although AB did hook up with a nice bull trout. We were certain we hadn’t seen the best that the Highwood had to offer.

At 4:10 we headed toward Livingston, on the way we drove past a fence row that had a baseball cap nailed on top of each post…..for more than a mile! Mom must have cleared Dad’s hat collection out of the closet!

We were on Hwy. 22 headed to the Oldman River, turned west on FS road 517 (mostly gravel road) which intersected the Forest Trunk Road (gravel & lots of dust). Passing thru Livingstone Gap we came across a Firefighter Helicopter Base.

Arriving at 6:45PM we fished Racehorse Creek and the Oldman River. (1553 miles from Seattle) Both had low water, but you could see by the riverbeds the torrents of water that rush down these stream during spring runoff. The Oldman is a beautiful river, lots of logs, pools, cascades and runs. The weather had turned cold (41-degrees) and the fish seemed off the bite. AM had several rises and caught one big fish, JR & MS had LDR’s. Again this river seemed to have lots more to offer, but it seemed that our timing was off with the low-pressure system cold-front moving in.