From the Prairies to the Foothills: Brazeau Dam Trip, Part 1

Edmonton to Highway 620, near Drayton Valley

(Oct 2023)

This is a 3-part blog about a day-trip from Edmonton Alberta to the Brazeau Dam site, in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It is a bit long, so I broke it up into 3 parts:

To Highway 620, from Edmonton, following the N. Sask River, more or less.
Highway 620 in the foothills, including a stop at the Brazeau Dam Reservoir.
From Highway 11 back to Edmonton, through the south-central farmlands.

There are two main aspects to a road trip: the journey and the destination. Sometimes the trip is all about the journey, sometimes it’s all about the destination. Usually it is a little of both.

To a considerable extent, it depends on the time spent on the journey versus the destination. If most of the time is spent “getting there”, then the journey is the main thing. If most of the time is spent “being there”, then the destination is the thing.

This Oct 19, 2023 day-trip from Edmonton to the Brazeau Dam and back definitely focuses on the “journey” aspect of a road trip, rather than the destination. As such, I will go through it in some detail, describing the various highways, large and small, paved and gravel, that we took. I will note the scenery and other observations that the journey inspired.

1) Edmonton to Spring Lake (Highway 628 west), then a short drive on Hwy 770 south to Hwy 627

Highway 628 out of Edmonton is mostly a fairly narrow two-lane road, that passes by the River Cree Resort and Casino (owned by a local native community), then by semi-rural farmland interspersed with acreage developments. Eventually it goes by a small community called Spring Lake, which is a nice little area about 30 km from the outskirts of Edmonton. I have friends and relatives that lived there, on acreage properties.

From the Spring Lake area, you can take a range road (20) south to pick up Highway 627 or carry on west to Highway 770, which can then be used to connect southwards to Highway 627. However we chose to carry on even farther west, which led to some narrow and hilly gravel range and township roads.

This was an interesting diversion, though rather slow, due to the gravel surface and the twisting roads. It was very interesting to drive and quite scenic – well treed, with small farms, sometimes hobby farms and acreage type dwellings. The trees are mostly aspen and balsam poplar with some white spruce. The hilliness is due to glacial deposits, from the time of the last ice age. Unfortunately, since I was busy driving and Scott was busy navigating, we didn’t get any pictures. It would be well worth returning, just for that, as well as the fun of the drive.

After a while we reached Highway 770, where we turned south. This is a fairly short connector to Hwy 627. It also goes through this hilly, small-lake country. Jackfish Lake is a notable local recreation area and fishing hole. By the way, Jackfish is another name for Northern Pike.

2) Highway 627 west to Intersection with Highway 759

After a drive of only ten minutes of so, we reached Highway 627 and headed west. The North Saskatchewan River comes fairly close to this highway at one point, but there is no crossing. The route is mostly farmland at this point, with some treed areas that seem to be following streams that feed into the North Saskatchewan, though many of these may be ephemeral streams (only there during high water).

There was a surprising amount of truck traffic on this stretch of the road. In a short time, this was revealed to be due to the Keephills Generating Station, which is just off the highway, to the south, less than ten kilometers from the turnoff.

This general area has been mined extensively for coal, which supplies this plant and some others just north at Lake Wabamun. As one would expect, there is a fair bit of moonscape, from the mining. Some of these areas have obviously been reclaimed as they are mined out, as there are large acreages of fairly new grass. We spotted a couple of very large pieces of machinery (drag-lines? Big buckets?), that had obviously used in coal mining. Were they too expensive to move? No market to sell them? Or were they waiting for coal-mining to be permitted again? It’s was a mystery.

As far as I know, the generating plants in Alberta are not supposed to be using coal anymore. But perhaps some are grandfathered in, and still use coal. It is hard to think of what else the big trucks coming to and going from the generating station would be hauling. Natural gas would no doubt be supplied by pipeline.

A look at their website said that two of their boilers have been converted to natural gas, but one of them is still burning coal, though with substantial emission controls. There was no indication of whether or not they were keeping it going with coal, intending it to be a CO2 capture project eventually. But, maybe that’s the plan. There are huge plans for carbon capture and sequestration in this general area.

At the intersection of Hwy 627 and Hwy 759, we turned south.

3) Highway 759 to Highway 39

This was fairly flat land, mostly farms and fields. The highway was good.

There is a small town called Tomahawk along the way, with a bar called the Dog Gone Saloon. The place has the virtue of interesting names. The saloon’s Facebook page seems to primarily feature strippers, which is, shall we say, unexpected. Some might say, this needs a photo, so this one is fairly mellow - nothing you might not see at the beach (from the saloon’s facebook page).

The highway does have a crossing of the North Saskatchewan River (Berrymoor Bridge). The river is quite broad at this point but the valley is not very deep and the bridge is quite utilitarian. Too be fair, the river is low at this time of year, so the view probably suffers a bit for that. There is a campground nearby, so you could try your hand at fishing, or put in a canoe.

At the intersection of this highway with Highway 39, we turned west again.

4) Highway 39 (22) to Highway 620, near Drayton Valley

Highway 39 is a fairly busy road, as it is approaching Drayton Valley at this point. That means quite a lot of truck traffic in particular, as Drayton Valley is an important industrial center for this area. That includes agriculture, forestry and oil-field, all of which are heavily truck-based.

Highway 39 ends a little ways before Drayton Valley, and becomes Highway 22. At that point, you can take Hwy 22 west or Hwy 22 south. We took the western leg as it heads towards Drayton Valley.

There is another crossing of the North Saskatchewan River shortly before getting to Drayton Valley. Like the previous crossing at Berrymoor, the bridge is far from spectacular, though the river is very wide and sports an island on one side (Google Maps photo). There are some campgrounds nearby, where you can rent cabins, and enjoy being near the big river. They look to be quite cozy.

There was a turnoff, which a lot of trucks seemed to be taking, somewhat before reaching Drayton Valley, but it wasn’t clear what the business was. Probably a sawmill, as there is a big Weyerhaeuser mill in town.

Just before the main part of Drayton Valley is the turnoff tho Highway 620, which goes to the Brazeau Dam and Reservoir. We turned south onto that road.

On the Road with Bronco Billy

Sit back and go on a ten day trucking trip in a big rig, through western North America, from Alberta to Texas, and back again. Explore the countryside, learn some trucking lingo, and observe the shifting cultural norms across this great continent.

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What follows is an account of a ten day journey through western North America during a working trip, delivering lumber from Edmonton Alberta to Dallas Texas, and returning with oilfield equipment. The writer had the opportunity to accompany a friend who is a professional truck driver, which he eagerly accepted. He works as a statistician for the University of Alberta, and is therefore is generally confined to desk, chair, and computer. The chance to see the world from the cab of a truck, and be immersed in the truck driving culture was intriguing. In early May 1997 they hit the road.

Some time has passed since this journal was written and many things have changed since the late 1990’s. That renders the journey as not just a geographical one, but also a historical account, which I think only increases its interest.

We were fortunate to have an eventful trip - a mechanical breakdown, a near miss from a tornado, and a large-scale flood were among these events. But even without these turns of fate, the drama of the landscape, the close-up view of the trucking lifestyle, and the opportunity to observe the cultural habits of a wide swath of western North America would have been sufficient to fill up an interesting journal.

The travelogue is about 20,000 words, about 60 to 90 minutes of reading, at typical reading speeds.

Driving North - On the Road to Northern Alberta and the Northwest Territories: A Driving Journal

Have you ever wondered about a road trip to the far north, north of the Sixtieth Parallel? Well, here is your chance to read about three road trips, through the Peace River country and the northern Rockies, all the way to the shores of Great Slave Lake, just south of the Arctic Circle.

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The highways in northern Alberta and the Northwest Territories give one the opportunity to drive pretty far north, without a lot of elaborate preparations and extreme expense. Starting from Edmonton, one can drive as far north as Yellowknife, NWT, without leaving the hardtop, so an average vehicle can do the trip. There are a reasonable number of fair sized towns along the way, so accommodations are not much of a problem, either. The same goes for food, gasoline and other essentials.

One can also link up with the Alaska Highway, and the Dempster Highway, and make it all the way to the Arctic Ocean. But that’s another story.

Trip number 1 involved driving north through Alberta, visiting several areas of interest along the way, then into the Northwest Territories, to Hay River on the southern shore of Great Slave Lake. The return trip featured a drive through the north-central foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

Trip number 2 was a combined air and car trip. We went to Yellowknife, Northwest Territories by airplane, then rented a car to explore much of the area of the north shore of Great Slave Lake.

Trip number 3 was a return to Hay River, with a different travelling companion. This allowed one to retrace steps, compare and contrast, and focus on some areas that we had not had time to explore in depth on trip number 1.

Dodecahedron Books

Sunday 29 October 2023