Fort Qu’Appele, northern lights, Prince Albert, Saskatoon
(posted from the Broadway Brewery coffee shop parking lot, Saskatoon, SK)
(this post covers 16-19 August)


Saturday, 19 August-
Today we started off with a driving tour of Prince Albert National Park. We took a short walk at Shady Lake and then another at Waskesiu Lake. The park has an ‘eastern’ look about it, or, perhaps more correctly, it looks like the Quebec or Ontario woods. There are lots of birches and gray aspens, often with a thick growth of mossy on the ground. There are many lakes and ponds. The trails are designed to be hiking trails in summer and cross-country ski trails in winter; they are wide swaths through the forest, apparently maintained by a full-size tractor and mower. At Lake Waskesiu we realized we have now gone further north than ever before. We turned on the GPS to get a position and see that we are just below the 54th parallel, which further east is in northern Labrador. One mark of how far north we are is seeing the electrical panels in the parking lot at the resort area of Waskesiu Lake—there are outlets there for winter visitors, i.e., to plug their engine-block heaters so their cars will start in the below-zero temperatures.
After an early lunch we headed down to Prince Albert then across to Saskatoon. After the turn south-west we were back in the flatlands but there’s now more pasture and open field than the large wheat and barley fields we saw coming up to Prince Albert. We were also in the Metis country. The Metis are descendants of French trapper/voyageurs and Indian women. They were long discriminated against and the Canadian government gave them aboriginal status in the early Eighties.
Saskatoon has an interesting western-town feel. It’s out on the prairie and we had ‘long views’ all around as we approached and drove around the city. Our first stop was ‘The Berry Barn’ for a piece of Saskatoon-berry pie. We had never heard of ‘saskatoons’ in reference to berries before learning in Regina’s Royal Saskatchewan Museum (from the information person) that when in Saskatoon one should visit The Berry Barn for some pie. The berries are very much like a blueberry but grow on large bushes. We asked our waitress and cashier what other names there were for saskatoons but they said they’ve never heard them called anything else. The Visitor Center person told us they were called boysenberries in the States but that’s not true—boysenberries resemble raspberries while saskatoons look like blueberries. Finally, the web gave us the answer—they are also known as juneberries.
After our Saskatoon-berry pie, we went to Wanuskewin, a native-canadian culture center. We enjoyed the center’s displays but the highlights for us were trying the bison stew, wild-rice salad, and bannock-bread as we sat on a deck which gave us a wonderful overview of the valley below. Afterwards, we walked the Path of the People Trail into the valley. The sides of this valley formed ‘buffalo jumps’, or cliffs for some 5000 years. The native-canadians would drive the buffalo into a panic and over the cliffs and people waiting below would finish them off and process them. Because it was late in the day, we were the only people on the trails and we took advantage of it, staying until closing fo the day. We spent the night at the east-side Wal-mart which had good overnight parking area for us.

Friday, 18 August-
Today we cleaned up the van and then got back on the road, pointed north. We drove to the town of Prince Albert, where we stopped at the visitor’s center (where I saw a replica of a 1800s river-freight vessel called a ‘York boat’) then did some shopping for supplies for the next few days at a Sobey’s grocery store.
I also want to mention that along the way I stopped for ice and had to pay $3.50 for an eight-pound block of ice. Ice is getting ridiculous. Back home I was paying $1.30 or so for an eight-pound bag of ice but by Minnesota it was down to a 5-pound bag for $1.50. In Saskatchewan, ice has been $2.00 CDN for that 5-pound bag and that’s the Wal-mart price. The further north I go, the more expensive the ice. That seems counter-intuitive but then again if it takes volume to make it in the ice business, the ice-selling season is a lot shorter up here.
After the town of Prince Albert, we drove on to Prince Albert National Park, some fifty miles north. We swung in the south gateway, choosing the slower but scenic route. We checked out Sandy Lake campground and at first passed it up, thinking we’d like to see the smaller Trapper Lake campground. But we returned to Sandy Lake because it has trails and a better view of the northern sky. We hiked for an hour and a half but didn’t see anything remarkable along the trail. Our campground is perfect—we have a great view of the lake and can hear loons calling in the distance.
We stayed up late looking for the northern lights again but it was not too be tonight. We could see a definite glow off in the north-north-east which we believe was northern lights but it’s too indistinct; we couldn’t see drapery or anything other than a glow that would slowly fade in and out.



Thursday, 17 August-
We had a great Wal-mart for sleeping last night except for one thing: at 0230 a neighborhood guy decided to roar around the mall parking lot for a while on his ATV. He had a grand old time, roaring across the lawn, jumping curbs, and trying to put his ATV into a drift. That went on for an hour, then seemed to stop only to start up again for another twenty minutes, this time with his laughing-loon girlfriend on the back. Ain’t life grand?
In the morning we headed northeast. We wanted to go see Fort Qu’Appelle (“kwa-pell”), a favorite getaway spot for Labashi’s parents when they lived here. As we drove out of town the landscape was very flat but soon turned to very gently rolling hills. By the time we reached Echo Lake, we had a wonderful landscape of western-style very dry, dead-grass, deeply-ravined hills along the lake. The nearby town of Fort Qu’Appelle looked like a western town too--- very wide streets, store-front buildings (including an 1800’s Hudson’s Bay trading store), cars parking diagonally in front of the stores. We had an ice cream at the video store/general store and gassed up before heading out into the backcountry. I paid $107 to gas up… and only needed a little over half a tank. The gas was $1.15--- per liter, or about $4.60 per US gallon. And that was the off-brand, el-cheapo gas.
We then drove north up Route 35, all in the country. Once again we are amazed at the size of the fields and farms. We later spoke with a guy at our campground who told us it’s now common for farmers in this area to plant 10,000 to 15,000 acres. (The dairy farm I worked on for a summer as a 15-year-old consisted of 60 acres!)
The roads are arrow-straight and I bet we didn’t pass two cars an hour coming the other direction (and we didn’t see any at all going our direction) for the two hours it took us to get to Wadena. In Wadena we stopped at a visitor’s center and learned there’s an internationally-recognized birding area nearby at Quill Lakes. But we’re early; the action will start in a couple of weeks. Right now we could see some blue-billed grebes and some white pelicans but the rush hasn’t started yet.
By 1800 we were ready to get off the road and stopped at a little municipal campground at Melfort. There was only one other camper in the campground and I had to go ask him for the combination to the bathrooms/shower building and so learned that he’s a local farmer who camps there once in a while to take a few days away—not a whole lot of visitors to this campground. We saw that brochures about Melfort say it’s the ‘gateway to Saskatchewan’s North’ and is ‘the city of the northern lights much of the year’. After supper we took a walk around the campground then waited for dark, joking about the fat chance of seeing the northern lights. As the sky ever-so-slowly lost light, we got out a Kwik Kampfire (sort of an ultra-big candle sold as a campfire-in-a-can) and sat around it to keep warm. The temperature was around 55 and dropping fast. Finally, we could see the major constellations, then the swash of the Milky Way. We thought we’d see shooting stars but instead we started seeing satellites. We counted eight of them within a half hour. Then we finally saw a shooting star and not long after Labashi saw another but I missed that one. Then we counted three more satellites. During our scans of the sky for satellites or shooting stars we noticed that a portion of the sky seemed to be cloud-covered. We could see the Big Dipper, Little Dipper and North Star but nothing below them. Labashi said she thought she saw something moving but I (of course) said it’s just moisture in the air. About that time we definitely noticed movement— it looked like a shaft of light was building up in the direction of Melfort. And then—there they were…the Northern Lights. We suddenly had draperies of light, and the draperies were moving. ‘Folds’ in the draperies seemed to ruffle in an unfelt breeze. Then one end of the drapery faded. Somewhere in the middle a ray of light seemed to grow in intensity and vertical size while other parts of the drapery collapsed. Before long, the whole show seemed to fade back to a white haze. And after a few minutes, it would start again.
Throughout this Labashi was so excited she was pounding me and jumping up and down. “I can’t believe it! That’s really it! I can’t believe it! That’s really it! I can’t believe it!”--- you get the picture.
Anyway, it was super-duper-with-a-cherry-on-top cool. Labashi of course wanted to go across the field for a better angle and that indeed did seem to give us a better show. I’m not sure if it was coincidence or what but the displays seemed to fade if we’d walk back toward the van or put on a brighter show if we’d stay out in the field (a difference of about 20 yards).
We couldn’t see the horizon because of trees around the campground so we walked out to the nearby road (this is shortly before midnight) and immediately realized we needed to go for a drive to get a better view. We drove west, away from the lights of town and soon came to a place where I could park the van facing the northern-lights display and we could watch from the comfort of our van. We stayed there for about half an hour, jaws agape most of the time, just parked in the middle of nowhere.
This was Labashi’s first sighting of the northern lights and she can’t quit smiling. It was my second time—but the first was 45 years ago. Nevertheless I remember it well. I don’t know where we had been but my Dad was driving the family home late at night and we were somewhere near Newville or Shippensburg, PA—on US11, I believe—headed for home. The northern lights were shining to our right above the mountain forming the north side of the Cumberland Valley. As an 11 or 12 year old living in the time of the Cold War with the USSR, I at first saw the northern lights display as threatening. I thought it might have something to do with the Russians bombing us—perhaps that’s what radiation looked like from ICBMs. But Dad explained it was a phenomenon of nature and then it seemed magical. Almost as magical as tonight.


Wednesday, 16 August-
After a noisy night at Chez Wal-Mart, we arose to a cloudy and cool day. We spent the morning at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum which had very well-done displays on the geological history of the province and an excellent First Nations section. The earth sciences section gave us a great overview of the physical geography of Saskatchewan and has convinced us to go north and see some of the variety. The area here around Regina is an ancient lakebed and is as flat as a pancake. After visiting the Qu’Appelle Valley (formed by the glacial melt) we will head for Prince Albert National Park to see some of the uplands.
The highlight of the First Nations section was seeing an hour-long film on pow-wow dancing and on making a tipi. The preparation of the 15 buffalo hides for the tipi cover was amazingly laborious; it’s no wonder nobody does that anymore.
After the museum visit we spent a few hours connected to the internet in the parking lot of the Java Express to check and respond to our email, upload my blog posting, and do some miscellaneous web work—like looking for the predictions for northern lights activity (solar activity is low for the next few days) and checking news headlines. I had one of the Java Express “Java Jolt” coffees and that wasn’t bad at all- the two shots of espresso provided the jolt.
Afterwards we drove to the Regina Public Library for Labashi to see what she could find in the Prairie History section about Regina in the early Fifties. She spent a couple of hours perusing old photos and made some copies to take to her folks.
We then headed to the north-side Wal-mart to (hopefully) have less noise tonight than at the Regina-South Wal-mart of last night. We had supper from the leftovers from last night’s meal at the Zest restaurant. This afternoon while Labashi was doing her thing with the computer at the Java Express, I bought a bottle of the German wine she liked last night at ‘Zest’ — J & H Selbach Reisling Spatzele. So we had another gourmet meal tonight, even though it was in our van in the Wal-mart parking lot! After supper, we did some shopping for supplies and also checked out a Canadian grocery store- Sobey’s. The Wal-mart is of course similar to the ones in the states but does have some differences in what they stock. Appliances, for instance, tend to be the Canadian brand ‘Danby’, for instance. And though we get a ten-percent favorable boost on the exchange rate of the dollar, things overall are more expensive here, at least for food. Also, the Wal-marts here are somewhat behind the times in that there are no Super-Wal-marts and these close at ten p.m. The Sobey’s we checked out had a great variety of food but seemed extra-expensive.