I was on my way to really put the long in long weekend.

This is what happened. My friends Wendy and Dave were getting married on Sunday and I had long ago committed to being there for the ceremony. No problem. I said I would be there and I wasn’t about to miss the big event.

The thing is, though, that the first weekend in August is always the date for the Writing-On-Stone Rodeo. Since 1968 when our family first moved to Milk River I’ve only missed a handful of these, the best rodeo in the world. I cringed at the thought of missing one now.

How to solve this slight dilemma? Easy, I’d go to the rodeo on Saturday and make it to the wedding on Sunday. No problem.

Except for the fact that the wedding was in Creston, B.C. That meant that I was going to have to make the four-hour drive to Writing-On-Stone for the evening rodeo and then roll on into the night to make it from there to Creston, five more hours away to the west.

Doable, yes. But it was going to be a very long weekend.

The weather was awful down in the Milk River country. It had been breezy and a bit hazy on the way there. But by the time I drove through the gap in the Milk River Ridge and headed east toward Writing-On-Stone, the wind had tripled in speed and the wildfire smoke had thickened under a line of thunderstorms that the wind was pushing through.

And on top of that, it was hot. The truck’s temperature display read 34 C when I stopped at Coffin Bridge to take pictures of the nearly-dry Milk River — more on that situation to come — and it had only dropped a couple of degrees as thunderstorms moved in.

What little light there was had an orange tint to it and the band of mulie bucks I found bouncing through a canola field were obscured in smoke and blowing dust before they were even 300 metres away. The Sweetgrass Hills just 20 kilometres to the south on the Montana border were almost entirely hazed in. But it was only just a little past 5 p.m. and the rodeo wouldn’t start for another two hours. Maybe things would change.

And they did, sorta. The wind backed down and the storms rumbled off to the east. The smoke stayed, but it thinned a bit once the wind stopped swirling it around so much. And though the sun didn’t quite pop through, it did provide a bit more light from behind the remaining clouds.

So by the time the rodeo started, the light was soft and warm, the temperature had dropped to a much nicer 26 C and folks were filling the stands. It was going to be a great evening.

My only disappointment was that one of the best parts of this rodeo wasn’t going to happen. With so little water, virtually no one was playing in the river. In other years, there would be horses splashing and kids swimming. But not this year.

With the flags paraded and the anthem sung, the rodeo began. The calves and steers got roped, the broncs got bucked and the barrels got figure-eighted. All of........

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