Thompson redux, the Interlake, Gimli, Whiteshell Provincial Park, and back to Kenora (posted from Seattle Coffee, Thunder Bay, ON)
(this post covers 18-21 August, 2007)
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Tuesday, 21 August-
We awoke early this morning- shortly after 06:00- and decided to get on with our day. We had a rainy and windy night which interfered with our sleep for a couple of hours but then we slept very heavily and awoke refreshed. After breakfast and showers we drove east to the Bannock Point petroforms area. A trail leads back through the boreal forest to areas of bare rock—the Pre-cambrian Shield—where petroforms thought to be as much as 1500 years old lay. A common form is that of a turtle, which, as we learned earlier in our trip, is the key animal of the Ojibwe creation story. All the world is a giant turtle on whose back everything rides. It was easy to see this is an area of great significance. Around the area hang dozens, if not hundreds, of colorful pieces of cloth left by people who still use the area for religious or tribute ceremonies. We saw special (modern) tribute stones, one a set of coal-size crystalline stones placed at the eight points of the compass and a white heart-shaped rock in the center. And we saw ceremonial bowls, tobacco tributes, pouches of unknown materials, and a human effigy-doll laid in places of special significance. It was all very striking. We could easily imagine being here at dawn, or dusk, or in the light of a full moon and feeling a particularly-strong connection or sense of wonder.
We then drove on to the Alfred Hole Canada Goose Refuge, just outside of Whiteshell Park. There we met an enthusiastic, young and very knowledgeable woman ranger in charge of the center. She told us about the five different subspecies of Canada geese which came through the center during their migration—including one named for the center. She pointed out one goose which had drooping wings and said it was a Lesser Canada goose which just came in from the north late yesterday or this morning, the first she has seen this season with the drooping-wing problem. The drooping wings indicate a vitamin deficiency characteristic of geese right after they migrate in from areas such as the tundra where their food plants have lower nutrient values. After a few days here browsing the higher-nutrient plants of this lower latitude, the goose will be able to lift its wings into their normal resting place.
After lunch we started out again on our more-or-less homeward path, taking 44 down to the Trans-Canada Highway just east of the Manitoba-Ontario border. At the border we stopped at the visitor center to look for another copy of a particular map we like (the Northern Manitoba Adventure Map) and chatted with the very nice visitor center woman we had met on the way in. We told her of our travels throughout the province and promised to send her an email summarizing our wonderful Manitoba trip.
We then drove on to Kenora again, where we stopped at the Safeway for supplies and a frappacino. We then drove on via 17 across the beautiful ridges and lakes between Kenora and Ignace. By then it was after 17:00 so we camped for the night at Sandbar Lake Provincial Park, spending our evening listening to Bill Moyers podcasts, catching up on our logs, and reading.
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Monday, 20 August-
After a wonderful night on the windy western shore of Lake Winnipeg, we drove into the town of Gimli to visit the Icelandic Heritage Museum. Because of several factors in Iceland in the 1870’s----- much colder than normal temperatures, crop failures, famine, and disease ---- approximately one-quarter of the population emigrated to another country. A group of Icelanders petitioned the government of Canada to grant them a new territory for their exclusive use. Amazingly, Canada granted them a large contiguous piece of land – a reserve for their exclusive use -- on the western shore of Lake Winnipeg and emigration began in 1876. But a smallpox epidemic and the harsh winters and hot summers resulted in about 250 of the 300 original Icelandic families moving on to North Dakota. Later, the borders of the reserve were opened up and Gimli today has only about 30 per cent of its residents claiming Icelandic roots. We enjoyed our visit to pleasant little Gimli but today it’s becoming a resort town for nearby Winnipeg and is a little too civilized for us given its many ‘resort’ subdivisions, golf courses, etc. In other words--- boring!
We then continued down the western shore of Lake Winnipeg until we could turn for Ontario at Selkirk and continued on to Whiteshell Provincial Park in a light rain. Whiteshell is an 1800 square-mile park with a variety of landforms and aboriginal petroforms, i.e., ceremonial sites featuring figures of humans, turtles, snakes, and birds made by piling and lining up stones to form a shape.
We visited the Whiteshell Natural History Museum which had excellent taxidermy mounts of the park’s wildlife and a good section on wild rice harvesting in the area and the rest of the province. I loved getting a chance to handle a mid-century Trapper Nelson pack and packboard—it reminded me of my Boy Scout days.
After the museum we checked into a campsite at the Nutimik Lake campground nearby and spent the evening reading and blogging.
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Sunday, 19 August-
This morning we dropped by the library again to connect to the net and finish up email and checking our online accounts. We then gassed up and pulled out of Thompson, for the last time, headed south.
A few miles out of town we picked up a hitchhiker. His name was Ralph Alexander and he’s an Ojibwe who lives in the Cree town of Nelson House and works as a substance abuse counselor at the Nelson House Medicine Lodge (the tribal clinic). Ralph had dropped off a truck and some furniture for his daughter who was moving to a First Nations town further north to begin her new job as a nurse. He was now hitching back to Grand Rapids, about a three-hour drive from Thompson.
Ralph is a very interesting and friendly guy and we grilled him mercilessly, asking him question after question about aboriginal life in the area, about his occupation, about moose hunting and fishing (his hobbies) and about his wife and kids. The Medicine Lodge has a 17-week program of holistic healing which uses ceremony, psychology, lectures, and workshops to help their clients and Ralph is proud of his work. He says they have about a 75 per cent success rate. Ralph is married to a Cree woman so he picks up some of the language from her but says he still has a hard time with it. He also had a terrific sense of humor. We were talking about differences in wildlife between here and Pennsylvania and I asked if they have turkeys this far up. He replied, deadpan—‘Yeah, I know a few turkeys” and then smiled. He had told us he preferred to counsel outside his own community because it was so difficult to counsel his own relatives so I added: “And some of them are your relatives, right?” He liked that.
Ralph has heard a sasquatch. Yep, a bigfoot. Last year there was a big to-do around Norway House (we passed the turnoff to Norway House with Ralph) about the ferry operator having videoed a sasquatch. It turns out the guy is related to Ralph and told him a few days after it happened that he was still hearing the sasquatch make screaming sounds they’ve never heard before. Ralph went up there and heard the sound, which he says can’t be described. When we asked whether it could have been a cougar, he said, no, it’s not like that, nor is it like an animal under duress (like a rabbit’s screech when being attacked). Ralph was completely serious but who knows whether he was leading us on or not. Thank goodness we had asked about the Norway House sasquatch without indicating one way or another whether we believed it.
We eventually made it to Grand Rapids and dropped off Ralph at the gas station while we filled up for the next long leg down ‘the Interlake’. We had driven a hundred miles without seeing any type of habitation, business, or even a sign —just mile after mile of flat boreal forest and the hydro towers (electrical towers) running parallel to our course. But we did see a bear! A beautiful young black bear was walking along the road but disappeared into the bush as we approached and Labashi never got a shot off (a camera shot, that is).
We continued south, bound for Gimli on Lake Winnipeg. I ought to have my head examined for this one. For some reason I had set Gimli as my goal and we drove more than 450 miles today to get there. Gimli is the center of the largest Icelandic community outside of Iceland and we hear it’s a nice little town but it would still be there tomorrow and the next day. We passed several community campgrounds along the way and we could have stopped there but I wanted to see the lake so we didn’t get in until 18:30.
After supper Labashi and I walked along the west shore of Lake Winnipeg and imagined the voyageurs making their way along this massive lake. We saw black-tipped pelicans and after awhile had a fleet of white bugs fluttering about us as the sun set. We saw one of my favorite birds, a cedar waxwing, hovering and darting about oddly and it took us a minute to realize he (or she) was catching the white bugs. We were fascinated by his skill. He’d watch from a branch for a minute, then dart straight to a bug, get it, then flutter and pick off two or three more bugs in quick succession before returning to his branch. What a display!
As we walked on we also saw the slowest, cutest bat ever. Apparently the cedar waxwing wasn’t the only one interested in bugs. A bat fluttered toward us but had a hard time making progress against the brisk wind coming from our backs. But he didn’t give up despite the fact that he was making such slow progress upwind. He’d dart a little sideways to pick off a bug now and again as he went. What a cutie!
We returned to the van and spent the rest of the evening blogging and reading.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Saturday, 18 August-
Today was a recovery day. Before leaving for Churchill we had emptied and cleaned the cooler so this morning after our very long, hot showers we shopped for perishables and block-ice to start using it again and replenished the food box. We then dropped by the visitor’s center to see Carol. We had promised to let her know how our trip to Churchill had gone. Carol was a bit upset, though, because vandals had broken the head off the spirit-wolf statue in the side yard and had broken the ears and snout off three others a block away. Thompson is known for the fancifully-painted spirit-wolf statues throughout the town and heavily promotes them in tourist literature. Worse, the one at the visitor center had special meaning. It had been sponsored by a local man whose wife, an avid gardener, had recently died. He had bought the concrete statue of the howling wolf with his own money and had paid an artist to paint an intricate garden scene on it. The other wolves will eventually be auctioned off to raise money for town beautification projects but this particular one was to be kept permanently at the visitor’s center. One of the center’s security cameras was pointed at the wolf but the area was not lighted at night and the vandals could not be seen. After that bummer we stayed and chatted with Carol awhile. She is a lifelong resident of the Thompson area but has never been to Churchill. By providing details on costs and where we stayed we were hoping to encourage her to make the trip but I don’t think she will.
We then had lunch at Boston Pizza and I was finally able to taste their peppercorn poutine--- WOW was it peppery and very, very good.
We then drove to the library (which is closed on Saturdays) and parked within range of the wi-fi signal. I spent the entire afternoon writing a blog entry for this special week while Labashi wrote her log and read. After supper she took over on the laptop and I read for a few hours before we left for the campground at 2200.
We set our alarm for 2315 and checked for northern lights. We had a great starry night but no aurora.
======================== end of 22 August post ==================
(this post covers 18-21 August, 2007)
----------------------------------------------------------
Tuesday, 21 August-
We awoke early this morning- shortly after 06:00- and decided to get on with our day. We had a rainy and windy night which interfered with our sleep for a couple of hours but then we slept very heavily and awoke refreshed. After breakfast and showers we drove east to the Bannock Point petroforms area. A trail leads back through the boreal forest to areas of bare rock—the Pre-cambrian Shield—where petroforms thought to be as much as 1500 years old lay. A common form is that of a turtle, which, as we learned earlier in our trip, is the key animal of the Ojibwe creation story. All the world is a giant turtle on whose back everything rides. It was easy to see this is an area of great significance. Around the area hang dozens, if not hundreds, of colorful pieces of cloth left by people who still use the area for religious or tribute ceremonies. We saw special (modern) tribute stones, one a set of coal-size crystalline stones placed at the eight points of the compass and a white heart-shaped rock in the center. And we saw ceremonial bowls, tobacco tributes, pouches of unknown materials, and a human effigy-doll laid in places of special significance. It was all very striking. We could easily imagine being here at dawn, or dusk, or in the light of a full moon and feeling a particularly-strong connection or sense of wonder.
We then drove on to the Alfred Hole Canada Goose Refuge, just outside of Whiteshell Park. There we met an enthusiastic, young and very knowledgeable woman ranger in charge of the center. She told us about the five different subspecies of Canada geese which came through the center during their migration—including one named for the center. She pointed out one goose which had drooping wings and said it was a Lesser Canada goose which just came in from the north late yesterday or this morning, the first she has seen this season with the drooping-wing problem. The drooping wings indicate a vitamin deficiency characteristic of geese right after they migrate in from areas such as the tundra where their food plants have lower nutrient values. After a few days here browsing the higher-nutrient plants of this lower latitude, the goose will be able to lift its wings into their normal resting place.
After lunch we started out again on our more-or-less homeward path, taking 44 down to the Trans-Canada Highway just east of the Manitoba-Ontario border. At the border we stopped at the visitor center to look for another copy of a particular map we like (the Northern Manitoba Adventure Map) and chatted with the very nice visitor center woman we had met on the way in. We told her of our travels throughout the province and promised to send her an email summarizing our wonderful Manitoba trip.
We then drove on to Kenora again, where we stopped at the Safeway for supplies and a frappacino. We then drove on via 17 across the beautiful ridges and lakes between Kenora and Ignace. By then it was after 17:00 so we camped for the night at Sandbar Lake Provincial Park, spending our evening listening to Bill Moyers podcasts, catching up on our logs, and reading.
----------------------------------------------------------
Monday, 20 August-
After a wonderful night on the windy western shore of Lake Winnipeg, we drove into the town of Gimli to visit the Icelandic Heritage Museum. Because of several factors in Iceland in the 1870’s----- much colder than normal temperatures, crop failures, famine, and disease ---- approximately one-quarter of the population emigrated to another country. A group of Icelanders petitioned the government of Canada to grant them a new territory for their exclusive use. Amazingly, Canada granted them a large contiguous piece of land – a reserve for their exclusive use -- on the western shore of Lake Winnipeg and emigration began in 1876. But a smallpox epidemic and the harsh winters and hot summers resulted in about 250 of the 300 original Icelandic families moving on to North Dakota. Later, the borders of the reserve were opened up and Gimli today has only about 30 per cent of its residents claiming Icelandic roots. We enjoyed our visit to pleasant little Gimli but today it’s becoming a resort town for nearby Winnipeg and is a little too civilized for us given its many ‘resort’ subdivisions, golf courses, etc. In other words--- boring!
We then continued down the western shore of Lake Winnipeg until we could turn for Ontario at Selkirk and continued on to Whiteshell Provincial Park in a light rain. Whiteshell is an 1800 square-mile park with a variety of landforms and aboriginal petroforms, i.e., ceremonial sites featuring figures of humans, turtles, snakes, and birds made by piling and lining up stones to form a shape.
We visited the Whiteshell Natural History Museum which had excellent taxidermy mounts of the park’s wildlife and a good section on wild rice harvesting in the area and the rest of the province. I loved getting a chance to handle a mid-century Trapper Nelson pack and packboard—it reminded me of my Boy Scout days.
After the museum we checked into a campsite at the Nutimik Lake campground nearby and spent the evening reading and blogging.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Sunday, 19 August-
This morning we dropped by the library again to connect to the net and finish up email and checking our online accounts. We then gassed up and pulled out of Thompson, for the last time, headed south.
A few miles out of town we picked up a hitchhiker. His name was Ralph Alexander and he’s an Ojibwe who lives in the Cree town of Nelson House and works as a substance abuse counselor at the Nelson House Medicine Lodge (the tribal clinic). Ralph had dropped off a truck and some furniture for his daughter who was moving to a First Nations town further north to begin her new job as a nurse. He was now hitching back to Grand Rapids, about a three-hour drive from Thompson.
Ralph is a very interesting and friendly guy and we grilled him mercilessly, asking him question after question about aboriginal life in the area, about his occupation, about moose hunting and fishing (his hobbies) and about his wife and kids. The Medicine Lodge has a 17-week program of holistic healing which uses ceremony, psychology, lectures, and workshops to help their clients and Ralph is proud of his work. He says they have about a 75 per cent success rate. Ralph is married to a Cree woman so he picks up some of the language from her but says he still has a hard time with it. He also had a terrific sense of humor. We were talking about differences in wildlife between here and Pennsylvania and I asked if they have turkeys this far up. He replied, deadpan—‘Yeah, I know a few turkeys” and then smiled. He had told us he preferred to counsel outside his own community because it was so difficult to counsel his own relatives so I added: “And some of them are your relatives, right?” He liked that.
Ralph has heard a sasquatch. Yep, a bigfoot. Last year there was a big to-do around Norway House (we passed the turnoff to Norway House with Ralph) about the ferry operator having videoed a sasquatch. It turns out the guy is related to Ralph and told him a few days after it happened that he was still hearing the sasquatch make screaming sounds they’ve never heard before. Ralph went up there and heard the sound, which he says can’t be described. When we asked whether it could have been a cougar, he said, no, it’s not like that, nor is it like an animal under duress (like a rabbit’s screech when being attacked). Ralph was completely serious but who knows whether he was leading us on or not. Thank goodness we had asked about the Norway House sasquatch without indicating one way or another whether we believed it.
We eventually made it to Grand Rapids and dropped off Ralph at the gas station while we filled up for the next long leg down ‘the Interlake’. We had driven a hundred miles without seeing any type of habitation, business, or even a sign —just mile after mile of flat boreal forest and the hydro towers (electrical towers) running parallel to our course. But we did see a bear! A beautiful young black bear was walking along the road but disappeared into the bush as we approached and Labashi never got a shot off (a camera shot, that is).
We continued south, bound for Gimli on Lake Winnipeg. I ought to have my head examined for this one. For some reason I had set Gimli as my goal and we drove more than 450 miles today to get there. Gimli is the center of the largest Icelandic community outside of Iceland and we hear it’s a nice little town but it would still be there tomorrow and the next day. We passed several community campgrounds along the way and we could have stopped there but I wanted to see the lake so we didn’t get in until 18:30.
After supper Labashi and I walked along the west shore of Lake Winnipeg and imagined the voyageurs making their way along this massive lake. We saw black-tipped pelicans and after awhile had a fleet of white bugs fluttering about us as the sun set. We saw one of my favorite birds, a cedar waxwing, hovering and darting about oddly and it took us a minute to realize he (or she) was catching the white bugs. We were fascinated by his skill. He’d watch from a branch for a minute, then dart straight to a bug, get it, then flutter and pick off two or three more bugs in quick succession before returning to his branch. What a display!
As we walked on we also saw the slowest, cutest bat ever. Apparently the cedar waxwing wasn’t the only one interested in bugs. A bat fluttered toward us but had a hard time making progress against the brisk wind coming from our backs. But he didn’t give up despite the fact that he was making such slow progress upwind. He’d dart a little sideways to pick off a bug now and again as he went. What a cutie!
We returned to the van and spent the rest of the evening blogging and reading.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Saturday, 18 August-
Today was a recovery day. Before leaving for Churchill we had emptied and cleaned the cooler so this morning after our very long, hot showers we shopped for perishables and block-ice to start using it again and replenished the food box. We then dropped by the visitor’s center to see Carol. We had promised to let her know how our trip to Churchill had gone. Carol was a bit upset, though, because vandals had broken the head off the spirit-wolf statue in the side yard and had broken the ears and snout off three others a block away. Thompson is known for the fancifully-painted spirit-wolf statues throughout the town and heavily promotes them in tourist literature. Worse, the one at the visitor center had special meaning. It had been sponsored by a local man whose wife, an avid gardener, had recently died. He had bought the concrete statue of the howling wolf with his own money and had paid an artist to paint an intricate garden scene on it. The other wolves will eventually be auctioned off to raise money for town beautification projects but this particular one was to be kept permanently at the visitor’s center. One of the center’s security cameras was pointed at the wolf but the area was not lighted at night and the vandals could not be seen. After that bummer we stayed and chatted with Carol awhile. She is a lifelong resident of the Thompson area but has never been to Churchill. By providing details on costs and where we stayed we were hoping to encourage her to make the trip but I don’t think she will.
We then had lunch at Boston Pizza and I was finally able to taste their peppercorn poutine--- WOW was it peppery and very, very good.
We then drove to the library (which is closed on Saturdays) and parked within range of the wi-fi signal. I spent the entire afternoon writing a blog entry for this special week while Labashi wrote her log and read. After supper she took over on the laptop and I read for a few hours before we left for the campground at 2200.
We set our alarm for 2315 and checked for northern lights. We had a great starry night but no aurora.
======================== end of 22 August post ==================
posted by Bezabor&Labashi | 23:59
1 Comments:
Road trips are wonderfull. Enjoyed the blog.
I was married to Ralph, both 18, for 6 months, he was the most necesery, special, violent person . Glad he's doing well.
Sandra
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