Nothing much – and more!

 Alberta and Saskatchewan

(More pictures at the end)

When we have asked people from outside the Canadian hinterlands what there is to see between Calgary and Toronto, most have said “nothing much”. Heading east, it’s a land of dry hills and then endless prairie. But we have managed to spend a week in this hinterland, and it’s a fascinating place. Again setting our GPS to “avoid motorways” we have sometimes ended up on dirt and gravel roads, traveling for hours without seeing another car or person. 

 

Calgary itself was fascinating, though we didn’t spend a lot of time there. It is made up of tightly dense neighborhoods of attached homes that each have supermarkets, dentists, theaters, etc., so lots of folks were walking, biking, and riding scooters. Not sure what that looks like when the temperatures plummets in the winter, but it makes lots of sense now. We were in town for the beginning of the Calgary Stampede – a state-fair-like event that features nightly rodeos, live music performances along with a carnival fairway. The prices were high to get into the grounds, and even higher for the events, and we decided to pass. Instead, we took Darwin to Tractor Supply’s self-service dog wash. He felt much better! 

 

Far more attractive to us was Dinosaur Provincial Park, near Brooks, Alberta. It is home to Canada’s Badlands and an awesome wealth of fossil remains of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures. They were stuck in the mud of an ancient lake and exposed by erosion after millennia underground. A dinosaur nut in my childhood, I was in my happy place, but the heat was oppressive, even overnight, and shade was nonexistent. We decided not to stay a second day; Darwin had what appears to have been a heat-related seizure our second week out, and we are trying to keep him from having another. (He’s doing great, by the way). 

 

We traveled east through Lethbridge and Medicine Hat before heading into Saskatchewan, which promised to be cooler. 

 

The enthusiastic young man at the “Welcome to Saskatchewan” centre on the Trans-Canada Highway suggested that we get off the main road and explore the back roads and byways to get a real taste of the province, so we have spent the next five days doing just that. 

 

Saskatchewan is the least densely populated province on our itinerary (1.8 people per square km). If you want to know how it compares to other provinces, check here. Virginia, by contrast, is almost 50 times as dense, at 84.68 people per square km.

 

Our first stop continued my dino-ecstasy. Eastend, Saskatchewan, is home to the T-Rex Discovery Centre. One of only eight nearly complete fossil skeletons of Tyrannosaurus Rex ever found – and the largest of them all – was found here, and paleontologists come from all over the world to study it and the other fossils that have made it to the surface in the valley of the Frenchman River. 

 

We were excited to hear that the Northern Lights were expected to make a rare summer appearance in southern Canada and northern U.S. on Thursday, so we started checking weather forecasts to see where the skies would be clear and dark enough to experience this lifetime bucket list item. The road we were on led to cloudy skies, so we headed north, to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan’s largest city at 246,000, to position ourselves for a more northern path through the province. 

 

Saskatoon was lovely – we took a boat ride down the Saskatchewan River and took a walk along the river to see the pelicans who migrate every day 150 km (!!) from their breeding ground to feed downstream of the weir (low dam) before heading off to winter in South America. 

 

The northern skies were much clearer, but the forecast for the northern lights changed, and we didn’t get to see them after all. Still on the bucket list. So we dropped back down to visit Moosejaw (home of the world’s tallest moose) and Regina and head east again. 

 

The pictures I took in rural Saskatchewan all seem to look the same: yellow or green on the bottom half and blue on top (gray when there was smoke), with a straight line dividing them, sometimes with some small thing – a barn, a pair of antelope, an oil well, a house – in the middle distance. That’s what most of Saskatchewan that we saw looks like. It’s oddly relaxing, and not as boring as it might seem. The yellow gives way to delicate canola flowers and black-eyed Susans. Grasses undulate like waves all the way to the horizon. The sky is infinitely wide and clear. The wind blows up clouds of dust from distant roads. Birds dart in and out, chasing the myriad grasshoppers and other insects. Hawks swoop down for small mammals. The occasional tractor creeps across an endless field.

Alberta's badlands – dream of fossil hunters

A rabbit freezes to become invisible against the gray stone.

Hoodoos – with sandstone bases and harder, iron-filled rock on top –
look like little creatures among the badlands.

Seen on the road out of Dinosaur Provincial Park

Scotty – Eastend's T-Rex

We stopped to look at this mother (I think) hawk and at least two chicks.

Papa hawk was not pleased with my efforts to photograph the family.
He started to circle me and make dive-bombing gestures,
accompanied by loud screeches. I ducked back into the van fast. 

The largest moose (statue) in the world. A town in Norway briefly had a larger one,
but Mac's friends in Moose Jaw gave him a new, taller set of antlers to regain the record 

On the riverboat Prairie Lily in Saskatoon

Pelicans looking for dinner in the Saskatchewan River

Saskatchewan is a rectangle.
Quicker to describe (or draw) than to spell. 

Land of Big Sky

P.S. – Some place names of towns we have passed or passed through this week:

Bearspaw, Bassano, Medicine Hat, Skull Creek, Olga, Shaunavon, Swift Current, Kyle, Rosetown, Zelma, Watrous, Imperial, Stalwart, Holdfast, Findlater, Moose Jaw, Drinkwater, Qu’Appelle, Forget, Antler, Pipestone, where we are sleeping tonight beside the baseball field, and Souris (mouse), which we will see in the morning.