Last summer, southbound travellers on a barren stretch of Highway 43 in west-central Alberta were bemused by a massive sign featuring the familiar red and gold logo of a prominent multi-national petroleum conglomerate and identifying one of the firm’s retail locations.

The first letter in the company’s name, S, was notably missing in action. Visible therefore for several kilometres as motorists approached the village of Sangudo was the bold designation: HELL.

And that is precisely the kind of summer this last one was here in Wild Rose Country, as many in these parts would hasten to affirm.

An ominous harbinger of things to come appeared in the month of May when it was announced that mad cow disease had been detected on a farm near Wanham in the province’s famous Peace River Country. Beef ranchers watched in horror as the price of cattle plummeted in response to an international ban imposed on Canadian beef by the United States and something like 30 other countries.

An employee showing up for work one morning at the land-fill site near Camrose was alarmed to find someone had dumped several animals there overnight. The sight of several sets of hooves pointing skyward graphically portrayed the kind of desperation some in the ranching community felt as they concluded that the expense of feeding their animals was costing them more than they could fetch for the critters at auction.

West Nile Virus began showing up in dead crows sometime in June as it became apparent the disease that had been slowly working its way across the continent over several summers would not spare the West.

By the time summer officially arrived toward the end of June, it was obvious it was going to be another extremely dry and hot one. Rain clouds put in fewer appearances than there are Liberal Members of Parliament in Alberta.

Not surprisingly, by mid-July numerous forest fires were burning across the province as forests protested a fourth straight summer of minimal rainfall. Residents of three or four towns in the Crownest Pass region in the southwest corner of the province were evacuated several times in early August as thousands of hectares burned out of control and threatened to consume their homes.

The density of the smoke that polluted the atmosphere was so thick for several days that even in Calgary, 200 kilometres to the north, residents were discouraged from engaging in regular summer activities such as golfing, jogging or mowing the lawn. On the particularly bad days, the barely discernible sun cast an apocalyptic aura over the Stampede City.

Traumatic as each of these developments were, I’ve been interested to discover that one aspect of Alberta’s pestilential summer that many in other parts of the country did not hear about was the infestation of grasshoppers.

A trip I took with my ninth-grade daughter in August into the east-central portion of Alberta brought to mind why Moses wasn’t winning any popularity contests by the time he departed Egypt with the Israelites in tow. If the locusts that visited Pharoah were anything like the grasshoppers we encountered near the Saskatchewan border, it’s no wonder the poor guy virtually went nuts.

The number and size of grasshoppers hitting our windshield as we drove made it sound like somebody was making popcorn-a sufficient annoyance to prompt my daughter to repeatedly apply the lingo of her generation to the mosaic of bug guts that eventually adorned the front of our vehicle. "Harsh, Dad." "Oh, that’s just rude!" "Guh-ross!"

An official with Agriculture Canada near Youngstown informed me his people had counted 1,000 grasshoppers per square metre in that region. "Usually, we consider about 30 per square metre to be a problem," he casually pointed out.

"Definitely the kind of summer that makes you think Mother Nature is trying to tell us something," he remarked.

Yes. Or Father God.