Day 6: The Canadian Prairie

Today we headed north to Canada on Montana Highway 24. Just before leaving our hotel, I talked briefly with actor Jon Voight, whose room was directly across the hall from ours. Of all the places to run into an A-list celebrity!  Oh, and for those of you who are into such things, he was very dashing in his dark blue blazer and matching pressed slacks. Very quiet, but a nice, polite, down-to-earth man.

The border crossing was interesting. We were there for about 30 minutes and never saw another car. Not even parked! Both the U.S. and Canadian customs looked deserted. The silence was deafening. A great place for solitude -- quite unlike the entry port on I-5 near Vancouver, BC!  The female border patrol officer was very helpful and suggested we make time to visit the nearby Grasslands National Park.

We followed her advice and ended up spending four hours there hiking, taking photos, and driving to various viewpoints. We drove a total of 30 miles on good gravel, dirt, and (naturally) grass roads.  The woman staffing the interpretive center at Rock Creek Campground was quite hospitable, offering us vanilla ice cream and apple butter. I passed, but it was tempting! The biggest surprise of the park (besides the solitude -- there were only about five other vehicles there) was the small area of badlands at the southern end. The lighting conditions weren't great since it was mid-day, but it was still an unexpected treat. Extreme southern Saskatchewan is in fact more rugged than I expected. Certainly no Glacier National Park, but the hills and bluffs probably reach two or three hundred feet in many areas.  Until we neared our destination for the night (Weyburn), it was anything but flat.

The Saskatchewan highways we drove today are terrible! Due to the cold winters, the roads have been buckled by frost heave, so they are rough and bouncy.  The smaller, more rural highways are even worse, with huge potholes and patches of asphalt completely missing. Fortunately, most of the potholes are marked by little red flags posted just to the right of the highway to help drivers anticipate them.  Some aren't marked, however, keeping the drive more interesting. :-)

Saskatchewan is one of three Prairie Provinces (the others being Alberta to the west and Manitoba to the east, where we are headed tomorrow).  This region is also sometimes referred to as the "oil and wheat triangle" of Canada, with vertices at Edmonton, Calgary, and Winnipeg. We are in the heart of it, although wheat dominated our view today (along with other crops such as sunflowers, alfalfa, and barley and related grains.  Oil dominates Alberta, and just to our south, near Estevan, SK.

The weather today was sunny and much warmer -- probably in the upper 20s!  Celsius, that is.  249 more miles today, making 1,539 miles total (or about 2,500 km for our Canadian friends).

Grasslands National Park

Rock Creek Campground and Trail

Badlands

:Putting it all together.

It turned out, this wasn't even a really bad stretch of highway!