We started the day off with the Toyota Corolla. I was hesitant about its usefulness in off-road environments, but it proved to be up to the challenge. We drove a few hours to just outside Fort MacLeod where we began to see evidence of the Alberta beef industry. None of the places we stopped had actual slaughterhouses on them (it’s hard to tell from the satellite photos), but we did see plenty of feed lots. These raise the cows until they are ready for slaughter–sometimes raising cows on contract for their owners. The smell wasn’t as bad as I would have thought, and some of the cows roamed freely on a plain, as seen in the pictures below. Buffalo were also on some of the lots.

We then stopped at the original slaughterhouse, Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump. An interesting place, with a beautiful view of the Alberta plains.

On the way back, we saw a wind farm–a probably good way to make money from your land if you’re a farmer in Alberta. The wind mills were really beautiful, and spinning when we saw them. In the pictures, you can see the control station with a microwave tower for telemetry. In some of the pictures of the plains, you can also see microwave towers. I also noticed some fiber optic markers, but it seems for these long distances over flat terrain, microwave was more common.