We started our day on August 4th with an early hike along the Writing-On-Stone Hoodoo Trail. The cloudy sky granted us a reprieve from the previous day’s heat. It was about 24 degrees under a grey sky at 9 AM when we set out. It’s less than 3 kilometres one way, and not challenging, so you wouldn’t expect it to take long. The landscape is so incredible, however, that it’s impossible for kids to rush through it. Places must be explored, secrets discovered.
The kids immediately remarked that the stone formations looked like the houses in a Dr. Seuss book, and its easy to see why. The fantastic swirls of sandstone do seem to be the creations of a light-hearted and whimsical spirit. The Blackfoot say that this is a sacred place, but I can’t believe that Blackfoot children didn’t also just find it cool. Aside from the rattlesnakes and scorpions, and potentially crippling falls, the Seussian formations would make an amazing playground.
Back at camp, we packed up in a leisurely fashion. I stopped to chat with our neighbours. They were a retired couple who had sold their house and moved into a travel bus. Travel buses are the pinnacle of the RV food chain. They don’t get towed, they tow other vehicles. They are the great whites of the road.
Before we left the campground, we stopped in at the office to buy slushies. They had run out of lids for the drinks, but I bought them anyway, rationalizing that we would be careful. Back in the car, Baby Girl juggled her full drink in one hand, while trying to put on her seatbelt with the other. The cup was dangerously close to spilling red sugary liquid all over her, so I took it from her to free her hands and spilled it on myself instead. Then it wasn’t so full and she could take it back while I changed my shirt. My shorts looked like I had had a very bad zipper accident.
We drove on stickily towards Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park, straddling the border of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Thankfully the day was cloudy and cooler than the previous two. In this hot, dry country we were grateful for the lack of sunshine; it made the drive bearable.
In Medicine Hat, besides stopping for gas, we went in search of knives, to replace Baby Girl’s knife, lost on Castle Mountain, and mine, given to Baby Girl to lose on Castle Mountain. We stopped at an outdoor store called Valhalla Pure. I’ve never heard of it, but it seems like a chain. Inside, the impossibly clean and pretty salesperson asked if she could help. She was dressed in a yoga outfit, black pants and light blue tank top, and was snacking discreetly from a baggie of trail mix with not too many Smarties to cross the line into junk food. I asked for her knife selection, suddenly aware that I was wearing three days of beard, my hair was styled by wind and neglect, and half a raspberry slushy decorated the front of my shorts. She was a consummate professional, however, and merely curled her lip in light amusement rather than full-blown mockery. As she rang up our two new knives, I noted that her armpit was shaven smoother than a baby’s cheek. I have been in the wilderness a long time. The bears I run into on the trail are much coarser.
Our next stop was just down the street, at a drugstore post office, where Those Johnston Kids bought stamps for postcards home to Mama. We just missed the mailperson who was emptying the mailbox out front as we were going in to buy stamps. When we told the counterperson inside about the disappointing miss, she literally ran out the back door with our postcards in order to make the rear pick-up. Small-ish town people are great.
Finally, capping our brief visit to Medicine Hat, we paused in a bakery on our way back to the car and bought nanaimo bars for the road. Ironically, I don’t recall buying nanaimo bars in the actual Nanaimo. The medicine hat bars were good though.
Cypress Hills is a big park with many campgrounds, but we settled on Reesor Lake, trailer friendly and set out in the bush, far from any roads or tracks. On our way there, I missed a turn and only discovered the mistake when the next sign was for the border with Montana. I was tempted to go see the Sweetgrass Hills, but we corrected course instead.
Reesor Lake looked magical as we came down the hill from the west and around the end of the lake. The water was calm and dark green in the late afternoon light and pelicans glided across the water stately and aloof. We saw large fish jumping to catch low flying bugs, spreading ripples across the quiet water. We guessed that the fish explained the presence of so many pelicans.
We drove on to the Cypress Hills, Reesor Lake Campground and found an empty spot. Things are a lot calmer out on the road, now that the long weekend is over. Campgrounds are half empty and quiet again. Of course, ours wasn’t for long. Those Johnston Kids discovered that our camp neighbours had two young children as well and we were both across the gravel road from the playground and sward.
I let them work off an afternoon drive’s worth of energy. It involved really disturbing levels of screeching. I would have asked them to tone it down, but the other kids were at about the same volume and none of the other parents seemed concerned.
While they worked out how best to hurt each other, I made fry bread, or bannock, or scone, depending on your custom. Can you believe that I haven’t had a chance until now? The neighbour’s little girl invited herself and her mother over to have some and I was happy to share. Everybody agreed that it was really good and I don’t know how to make just a little.
After dinner we played a card game called Timeline, at Baby Girl’s insistence. It’s a historical game with simple rules. You have a hand of cards, each containing an historical event, with the date on the back. You take turns placing a card down in historical sequence. If you place it incorrectly, you discard the card and take another. The objective is to correctly place all your cards so you have none left. The amusing thing about our game is that I placed my cards as well as I was able, but then she would ask me on her turn where she should place her cards. It gave me lots of opportunity to teach science and history, but it was like I was playing with myself. Typical, really.