Thursday, June 8, 2023: Bison or not bison, that is the question!
Info:
Grassland National Park is located in the very south of Saskatchewan and borders the USA. It consists of two parts that are not connected. In the western part there have been bison again for several years.
My opinion:
I am considering just coming back after Alaska and spending the rest of my stay in Val Marie.
Diary:
Obviously, Saskatchewan has something that intrigues me. I already liked Regina so much!
Continuing west on the Transcanada Highway, I turned south at Moose Jaw. After a while the area became more and more lonely. Fields, pastures, fields, pastures. Very large fields and very large pastures. Ranch. Nice to have the neighborhood in view: somewhere on the horizon. Prairie as far as the eye can see, and the grass so incredibly green. How much drama can lie in nothing!
Then the ranches became even sparser, and at one point I drove 30 km without seeing a car, a house or a person. The quality of the roads also decreased significantly. And suddenly the road hit a snag, and I was standing in Val Marie.
In this place, time has stopped a little. That the roads are not paved is clear. Canadian calmness is more relaxed here, it seems like everyone here can live exactly how they want to, without much constraint from the outside. At least, that’s the impression they give. How far the social constraints in a small group so far away from comparable then work, I do not dare to judge.
The friendly lady at the Grassland National Park Visitor Center recommended two trails for me to hike and sent me to the council office to check in. Local government more likely. Val Marie is a village. But they have an ice rink for a field hockey team.
I entered a building that I wasn’t clear on exactly what it was and asked the gentleman at the counter if he was in charge of the campground. I had booked site 3 and already paid for it.
He smiled and said, then I didn’t need to come here. We got to talking when I said how beautiful I thought the area was. I could imagine living here – if the people I love were not somewhere else. Then he also began to rave about the area.
And suddenly he asked, “Do you speak German?”
Damn, is my accent that terrible?
Lo and behold, he was from Germany, had grown up on Lake Constance, and then at some point had moved to Michigan. There he had met a Canadian woman and moved with her to Val Marie. No stress, everything is cozy, you don’t even need a car unless you want to go to the national park. He spends a lot of time in the national park, which is even more beautiful than the area outside.
I drove to the first trail, which the friendly lady from the Visitor Center had recommended to me, although she had meant that it would start to rain. I decided it wouldn’t, ended up far from where I had wanted to go once again, but still in the national park, and went hiking there for a bit. The thing with the bisons was not so much the problem, they did not let themselves be seen anyway, whereby I must confess to my shame that I first mistook a herd of black cattle for bisons. But they were not.
The rattlesnake thing didn’t matter either, none showed up, which I was almost a little sorry about because I hadn’t seen any since the last time I was in the U.S. in the Rockies. And that was 22 years ago. Rattlesnakes are really beautiful. All snakes are actually really beautiful.
The third thing the friendly lady from the Visitor Center had warned me about was really annoying, though. Ticks. Not nice little crawling things like we have in Austria, but relatively large ones that can jump to boot. And how! This must be a special cross with fleas! Terrible, and that even though I wore my long hiking pants and tucked my pant legs into my socks. Two more days later I found one in Annie Way’s shoe box and had to hunt it down for a while until I could throw it out. I hope it really did end up outside.
Apart from that … indescribable. And I’ll leave it at that. How to describe something that is not only beautiful, but touches your heart so much that you are overwhelmed?
The next day I drove to the main entrance of the national park, from where you can drive 15 km in by car and come to a viewpoint about every 500 m, where there are information boards with explanations. The area was originally a shallow sea where the continent wasn’t sure about parting for a while – I’ve already told you about Thunder Bay and the Rift Valley table mountains there. What is now Saskatchewan was under water. And was so busy wandering north from the equator that it didn’t slow down in time and had to come back a ways to end up where it is today. Would have been kind of a shame …
And then came the ice age. 18,000 years ago was the peak here. And 9,000 years ago, when the glaciers melted, a river ran through the valley where Grassland National Park is today, which would have been comparable to the Amazon and swept everything away. I don’t think so. I was at the Amazon. And I saw the valley in Grassland National Park. It doesn’t add up. Not a chance.
It’s still big, this valley.
I didn’t go hiking then because the stations were so interesting and you could always walk a bit there anyway, so I had already done quite a bit of mileage when I finally arrived at the trail that the friendly lady at the Visitor Center had recommended for that day. Besides, I felt like rain.
There is a 60 km backcountry loop that you can drive. I rode a little bit of it because I wanted to know how Annie Way would do off-road, but that was perfectly obvious anyway. Annie Way can drive. Absolutely. Always and everywhere. And sometimes my Australian outback training helps a bit, too. Corrugations are corrugations, no matter where, and you either hop over them or crawl over them. Bouncing is more fun, but requires nerves. Annie Way has got nerves of steel.
Except for the butterflies. They both bugged us. We had a butterfly invasion. Freshly hatched moths that were simply everywhere, in every one of Annie Way’s crevices. When you opened her back doors, that’s where they sat. They even sat in her propane container box. In the slots where the parking tickets disappear. And my mosquito curtains turned out to be multitaskers, they work not only against gnats, but also against butterflies. Against most, at least.
Try standing under the shower at the campsite with a hundred butterflies fluttering around excitedly because they don’t want to get wet!
It took two days and 600 km to get rid of the last ones.
What else can I tell you? There is so much information about Grassland National Park, but I won’t plague you now with the top ten grass species, three of which are invaders (and cause the intense green), the animals that live there, the ecosystem …
The bison … I’ll tell you about that. There are bison in the park again. I was so preoccupied with the landscape, rocks, lichen, prairie dogs, birds, and plants at the first two stops that I didn’t think about bison at all. At the third stop, a woman asked me if I had seen the bison. On the other side of the valley, viewed from station 2. She had photographed it. Okay, her camera is far better than my second one (I successfully ruined the first one during the second week of my stay in Canada), I couldn’t have taken such a photo anyway. There was a mighty bison standing on a ledge against the reddish rock of the hillside.
When I, because I felt like rain, finally left the national park in the late afternoon, I looked in the direction where the lady had photographed the bison at station 2. There was a mighty bison standing on a ledge against the reddish rock of the hillside.
I then saw the exact same looking mighty bison standing somewhere else as an advertisement.
Annie Way and I reached the campground in time for the rain.
There are two encounters I would definitely like to remember. There was a Canadian woman who lives in Australia and has been to Linz many times. And then, at the most beautiful spot in Grassland National Park, a man approached me in German: “Are you from Linz?” He was born in Linz and came to Toronto with his parents in 1954 when he was five years old. He was almost moved to tears to be able to talk to someone not only in German, but in Linzian. And his wife, with whom we spoke English, gave me a very wonderful compliment. She said that if she hadn’t known, it wouldn’t have occurred to her that I wasn’t Canadian. Was a fib, but:
You made my day. All of you. (Including the bison.)