THE REDCLIFF YEARS

May 2000, our lives were to change again when Bruce's transfer request which he had put in for 5 years previously was granted. We eagerly anticipated the next chapter in our lives. We were ready to move the Canada Day weekend and we loaded up the car and made our way down south to Medicine Hat which was very close to the Montana border to the south and the Saskatchewan border to the east. We had bought a house in the small community of Redcliff which was 7 km west of Medicine Hat. As we neared "the Hat" I made a joke that I expected to see a tumbleweed at any moment and as if on cue a tumbleweed came tumbling across the highway in front of us. We thought this was hilarious. Medicine Hat is very desert like... very dry and hot in the summer and mild winters with very little snow. That first summer it was hot and sunny every day and I remember wondering if it ever rained. There were snakes and cacti and tumbleweed. It was to my mind the wild wild west. It was a complete change from what we were used to in Fort McMurray which was a typical northern terrain of trees and lakes. The south was the opposite... very flat, not many trees and no lakes to speak of. It took getting used to but I quickly grew to love the big sky, the farmland and ranches, the coulees which surrounded Medicine Hat and Redcliff, and the most awesome weather imaginable. Some find the prairies boring but they have their own unique charm for me.
Redcliff, at that time was a community of approximately 4000. It had anything you needed... a couple of drugstores, a hardware store, bakery, small grocery store, convenience stores, doctors who took you on automatically if you moved to town, dentist, daycare, a great chinese restaurant with daily buffets, several parks, a couple of bars, chiropractor and so on. It was not lacking and it was a short drive into Medicine Hat for anything else you needed or wanted.
On the outskirts of Redcliff were nice, newer homes with winding trails behind them overlooking the river valley... there was a lovely park by the river and horses nearby and there was a trail to walk on by the river with red cliffs surrounding. I referred to them as the Red Cliffs of Dover. If you looked across the river to the other side you could see a park which was located just outside Medicine Hat called EchoDale pictured below. The red cliffs you see in the one photo is looking across towards Redcliff from EchoDale.









We liked to go for drives in the Cypress Hills to a place called Elkwater. Elkwater was a townsite about seventy km from the Hat off the highway as you headed towards Saskatchewan.
The town was home to deer, wild turkeys and the occasional moose as well as humans. Elkwater reminded us a little of Fort McMurray because there were a lot of trees and a lake with a beach. Just a bit further on the road to Elkwater was a place you could camp and a small lake for fishing. It was a little piece of northern geography in the middle of bald ass prairie.









Also in the Cypress Hills region was a place called the Horseshoe Valley. Another place we frequented often on our many drives. It was beautifully green and lush and there were farms and a few acreages in the valley... I dreamt of living on one of those acreages every time we passed through.





There was the cutest little church in the valley called St Margaret's and we would stop and visit the church which was open to the public most of the time. It was really charming inside... so small with just a few pews and an altar and old organ at the front and a baptismal font. Outside was a small cemetery with gravestones old and new and we loved to walk through and read the inscriptions.









Bruce worked at Telus in Medicine Hat until 2005 when he retired. Still feeling he couldn't fully retire he took a job working at one of the greenhouses in Redcliff. He worked for a great guy named Alf who owned a cucumber greenhouse. Perhaps greenhouse work was not the most glamorous job in the world, but Bruce enjoyed the season he worked there. It was easy work, tropical climate, no stress whatsoever. He worked for several hours in the morning before the heat of the day and quite often after work he would sit with his boss and a co worker and enjoy a cold beer and then he would return home and had the rest of the day to do what he wanted to.
The season was over mid December and he had the winter off. That was a great year!

We had decided during that time to move back to Ontario to be closer to family in 2007. This was an especially hard decision because we had made many terrific friends and neighbors and had grown to love Redcliff and all it had to offer. But our desire to be closer to our families won and we packed up and moved across country to northern Ontario... Elliot Lake, in May 2007.