Today, I took a day off and decided to go to Waterton Lakes National Park, which isn’t far from here.
The park, which is joined together with Glacier National Park in Montana, USA, is an international peace park, and a World Heritage Site. Perhaps because both parks have been established for quite some time, the wildlife has long been protected; and as a result, is abundant. It is not unusual, for example, to see all kinds of fauna in and around Waterton. I’ve seen grizzly bears on the road to Cameron Lake, for example; and deer freely wander the townsite. But I’ve never seen a bighorn sheep until today.
And he was standing at the stop sign at the three-way-stop T-intersection that would take me into Waterton townsite. He was stopped, certainly; but what was he going to do? He had no turn signal on, so I guessed he was going straight through, but how to know?
The heck with it. I grabbed my camera.
In the end, I let him have the right of way, and he ambled through the intersection.
But that’s not the end of it. When I was leaving town, about a half-hour later, I encountered him again on the road. He was just walking, but the weird thing was that he was walking on the right-hand side of the road.When I came up behind him, he looked at me over his shoulder, and kept walking. I couldn’t pass over the solid yellow line on an uphill, but he just kept walking. So I slowly followed.
When we crested the hill, and he could see any oncoming traffic (and saw none), he crossed the road and climbed the mountain. I was able to speed up.
It was a treat to see him, but I had to wonder: just how did he know the rules of the road? To know how to proceed through a stop sign when being yielded to (as I did, to him, at the stop sign), and how to keep right until he knew it was safe to turn left?
I didn’t really care; it was just a treat to see him, and I enjoyed my day in the park.
