Motorhome News from North America 13

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Motorhome News from North America 13. 26th May - 4th June 2006
Alberta - Wild Rose Country

Calgary was once the land of the Blackfoot Indians. Since 1877 they have lived on reservations south of the city and now the corporate office towers of most of Canada’s crude oil and natural gas companies stand in their place. Calgary’s highways thread through the city like Hampton Court Maze, bewildering to us country folk, but there are clues to help the totally lost; the Avenues go east to west, the Streets from north to south - and all are blessed with dazzling displays of lilac. It was good to share some time in Calgary with long lost friends, Theo and Darlene, reminiscing on their Exchange Teacher year in the UK back in 1989 and to meet many of their now somewhat extended family.

We bussed into town to the Glenbow Museum to see the paintings of Canada’s famous Group of Seven, with a special exhibit of Edwin Holgate’s pictures and portraits. He served in the Royal Canadian Air Force in Surrey and Lincolnshire during the second world war and some of his paintings depict active life on the bases there. A print of A Y Jackson’s, ‘The Red Maple’, hangs on our dining room wall back home, a reminder of our goal to be in New England by the fall and a treasure from the past, calling us back to this lovely country.

Theo drove us way out east past scattered oil and gas wells on vast farmlands to the Tyrell Museum of Palaeontology by the banks of the Red Deer River at Drumheller. It would be fair-game to raise a touristy smile at the huge fibreglass replicas of dinosaurs dotted around the town, but the museum itself is spectacular and jaw dropping; surely the dream - or nightmare, of every child, with hundreds, yes, hundreds, of reconstructed skeletons taken from the surrounding hills. Sadly, the photographs have all been lost somewhere in the bowels of Adobe on our laptop. They may appear again someday - they usually do. We resisted the temptation to try Calgary’s other attraction, a Calgary red-eye - a concoction of beer and tomato juice, (ugh!) and set forth to the south on beautiful Highway 22 to our next destination.

Another picture hangs on the wall of our study at home, (one of Janice’s many superb photographs) of Waterton Lakes, taken on our last visit there. It could be said that this is our favourite destination - and we have kept our promise to return. Waterton is a special place; a place of serenity and freedom, of romance and peace. For one, the tourist busses don’t get that far. Overnight precipitation had brought a fresh fall of snow to the peaks the night before our arrival, dusting the long line of mountains to resemble iced pyramids on a desert plain of windswept blue waters, especially for us. Dark clouds were rising at the other end of the lake bringing two days of persistent rain-showers from the United States just a few miles away. The town - or city as any place with a population of more than ten is called, survives on a short but very sweet summer tourist season. Unlike The English Lakes, Devon or Cornwall, there is space here for everyone. Canada has a population of less than 30 million. It’s the biggest country in the world and none too difficult to get lost! The summer campers were yet to arrive in Waterton, allowing us the choice of pitch on the lakeside in the lee of shimmering aspen, bright in the green wraps of spring. All of the oil in the world cannot buy such a view!

The Waterton Lakes National Park stretches south into Montana in the USA. It teems with wildlife: buffalo and deer roam the hills, black bears and grizzlies are never far away, birdsong greets the turn of every corner and golden eagles ride the thermals high above. You don’t have to climb mountains to see the bighorn sheep in Waterton National park. They come to town in small flocks to eat the flowers and graze the verges, along with deer, playing chicken with the few cars on the roads. As we walked in the mid-day sun, swallow-tailed and dusty blue butterflies scurried across our path in frenzied dance to the rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, of downy woodpeckers on their wooden drums. Wild flowers were showing their heads through the undergrowth; pale purple clematis, bright yellow mahonia, white Saskatoon berry, red Indian paintbrush, Solomon seal, balsamroot, violets and orchids. Late in the day we spotted a loon on the lake carrying her two chicks on her back, and cerulean-blue mountain bluebirds sat atop the fence-posts, singing their territorial chorus. I guess that’s just a few of the reasons why we had to come back again.

A crowd of twelve joined us for the 7pm performance at the local cinema (seating capacity 130), a film we could not possibly resist, ‘Robin Williams RV’ - a bundle of laughs and tears we could relate to! Turn the clock back to 1960 and picture the cinema you once knew, the faded burgundy folding seats are now well-worn, the high ceiling is water-stained, the wood-fired furnace thunders at the rear, the glazed box-office stands proudly out front, and the smell of the pop-corn dispenser pervades the kiosk. Turn the clock back to a time of a cinema where the main feature came without trailers or advertisements. Can you imagine? If you’re too young (or too old) to remember, it doesn’t really matter - that’s Waterton. We’ll put the memories in an airtight tin and open it on special anniversaries.

Winnie’s gas-leak detector had been playing up over the previous few days, sounding off every time we started the water-heater for showers in the morning. Gas is not something to be messed with in a motorhome and we boiled water to wash our hair and scrub up for a couple of days, before deciding to drive the 30miles to the nearest dealer to get it checked out. After exhaustive investigation we concluded the problem to be the strong winds on the site at Waterton, blowing exhaust fumes back into the heater compartment. We suspected this might be the problem and had tried turning Winnie around away from the wind, but clearly air circulation was still causing the problem. Anyway, it’s alright now and we’ll know another time. The other false alarm was the vacuum cleaner. Janice tried it again after a few days and it worked! Female magic, I reckon - or, more likely, a thermostatic cut-out. It’s not for sale anymore.

There were two interesting attractions on our way from Waterton east to Taber. The first was the Remmington Carriage Museum at Cardston, the Mormon capital of Western Canada. They have more than 250 horse drawn carriages on display in this magnificent exhibition, from covered wagons to elegant town carriages, some, from coach-makers in England. As we were the only people there shortly after it opened, we had the guide to ourselves. The highlight for me was the half-hour spent in the restoration workshops, chatting wood, wheels and things, with the foreman. I guess I don’t need another job in this lifetime, but that’s one I could spend many a happy hour at.

Our second touristy visit was to the ‘Head smashed-in Buffalo jump’ interpretive centre near Fort Macleod. When the conditions were right, communal groups of First Nations Indians would herd buffalo over the cliff edge and harvest sufficient meat to see them through the harsh winter. An estimated 30-60million buffalo once roamed the plains providing valuable nutrition and skins for the Indian tribes. By 1900, white man’s indiscriminate greed for sport, hide and horn, had reduced this number to just 1,000 across North America before a halt was finally called. So much for the power of the gun - and the destruction of the innocent. Small herds now roam the plains once more thanks to subsequent breeding programmes; a few in the wild and many on ranches preparing for the next serving of Buffalo Burgers.


Across the open plains in the east of Alberta, giant grain elevators stand alongside the railway amidst featureless flat fallow fields stretching way out to the horizon. Wheeled irrigation sprayers line newly sewn cornfields awaiting with dread the summer heat wave, and deserted barns and houses are left to crumble in desolation since grandpa passed on: another home, another life, another generation, lost to the ravages of time and agricultural efficiency.

Taber is the corn capital of Canada and McCains have their processing and packaging factory nearby. The municipality also provides a picturesque campsite on the edge of town beside the river. Cottonwood seed filled the air and spread the woodland floor with a snow-like cover when we arrived in the evening, but by early morning the air was fresh and clear on the river’s breeze. This area was spectacular for birds. On a brief walk along the river-bank at the campsite, we saw Waxwing, Western and Eastern king-birds, a Gray cat-bird, Hairy woodpecker, Baltimore oriole, Northern flicker, Downy woodpecker, Osprey, Swainson’s thrush, Yellow warbler - and I could go on!

South of the town of Medicine Hat we came to Cypress Hills, an oasis of high hills rolling drunkenly in the midst of the great flat plains, dotted with stands of lodgepole pine and tiny shallow pools rich in bird-life. At around 4,600ft, the hills rise like Aires Rock above the prairie, a high plateau of mixed woodland and dry grassy meadows. The Provincial Park campsite at Elkwater is huge - I mean, huge. There are hundreds of pitches on several different sites across the hills, catering for summer family holidaymakers who come here for the hiking and lakeside bathing. It’s a long, long way to the sea.

Following the US border, we crossed the hills from west to east, on surfaced roads and gravel tracks, ever onwards into the wide skies of southern Alberta. To further our knowledge of Canada’s history, we went to Fort Walsh, a resurrected stockade of one built by the North West Mounted Police back in 1875. There were just the two of us on the ‘yellow school bus’ tour of the fort and its outlying trading posts. The Union Flag flew, reminding us that Queen Victoria was sitting tight to her throne in the late nineteenth century, watching, somewhat amused, as her Empire grew in total disarray around her. The fort was established to curtail the illegal whiskey trade with the Indians, to encourage the First Nations people to settle onto reserves and to establish Canadian sovereignty in the region along the US border. In 1876, Custer’s 7th Cavalry was annihilated by the Sioux and Cheyenne at the ‘Battle of Little Bighorn’ and the Indians fled northwards across the border into Canada here to escape the wrath of the US military. The NWMP were involved in keeping the peace with these 5,000 or so ‘illegal immigrants’ (was the term invented pre 1980?) until they were forced to return to the United States as the indescriminate slaughter of buffalo left their people starving. Fascinating stuff history.

Cypress Hills is as high as it gets in Saskatchewan. We came into the Province through the back door on a dirt road, crossing rolling grasslands at the border along the centre of the park on an un-surfaced road. The track was marked as a road on our map though the signs when we got there indicated that it was, ‘Un-passable when wet’. In the dry it seemed OK, rutted and mostly mud - so onward and upward into the unknown went the fearless. It couldn’t get any worse could it? Yep - it sure could! We bounced along unsteadily for ten miles across endless open grassland, up and down dale, sharing the rutted road with cattle grids and inquisitive cows with their calves. We could hear them thinking, ‘They must be English to be on this farm track in a motorhome.’ Now, that’s adventure!

For some strange reason, the thought occurred to Janice that we had lost another hour somewhere on our travels. She had noticed a time-line on the map as we crossed into Saskatchewan, so we duly altered our watches. Tomorrow came as it inevitably does and we rose early to catch the first guided mini-bus tour at the Chaplin Bird Reserve, on private sodium-sulphate lakes. We waited at the gates for an hour - the clocks don’t change here in the summer, we’re told! I feel an hour younger already.

We had hoped for an expert to help us with the difficult subject of waders, but our driver, a young lady, was a new recruit to the reserve - she could drive well enough on the bumpy roads, but had sparse knowledge of the bird-life. The bus was crowded. Janice, Melony the driver, and me! Our visit coincided with the Chaplin Bird Festival, though the weekend of events suggested in the leaflet finished with our arrival on Saturday evening! The birds however, had heard about the special weekend; there were dozens of rare piping plovers and hundreds of avocets luring us away from their nests by the road, running before the bus with mock injuries. There were Wilson’s phalarope going round and round in circles (as they do) - and thousands of sandpipers crowding our path to slow us down, then taking off in huge flocks of flashing wings. This could easily have been the salt marshes of the Camargue - only the flamingos were missing.

Tonight, we’re camping in Moose Jaw, just west of Regina the capital of Saskatchewan. We’ll take a walk in the park shortly and then wander into town for a meal. The football season is now over, (that game where grown up men play a sort of rugby in padded suits and crash helmets) and the boys and the men are now playing rounders in fancy dress. Schools break up in a week or two and campsites will start to get busy. Summer proper is just around the corner.

Please, can somebody slow the clock down?


David and Janice. The grey-haired nomads.

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Photos

Waterton Lakes National Park
Somewhere at the top of our list of favourite places visited. We promised to return.

Waterton Lakes Campground
Now, there's a view to wake up to!

Remington Carriage Museum
In the workshop

Cypress Hills
The road through the Provincial Park

Crossing into Saskatchewan
via the back door