Some of the Trading Thoughts columns this year will describe vacation spots we have seen to encourage readers to explore this fantastic country.
In the 1970s my partner and I started taking day trips on weekends to see this large, diverse province.
One of our first was an overnight stay in the Cowtown of Maple Creek and a visit to the Great Sand Hill dunes. Our cool little motel, believe it or not, cost a mere $20 a night.
In the morning, we headed north on Highway 21 to a point where a small sign indicated a turn right would take us to the sand hills.
Our Toyota Corona drove us through a farm yard into a pasture, and soon we were driving in a storm of grasshoppers, flanked on either side by 15-foot-high sand dunes stretching west.
| Photo by Ron Walter
We drove and drove and drove straight ahead on the prairie grass with nothing in sight but sand dunes and flat dry grass ahead.
We were beginning to think we were lost in no-man’s land when we spotted a ranch. Driving closer we saw a weather-beaten house, barn, corrals and lots of deer and antelope skulls hanging all over.
Three husky men were sitting on stumps and pails in the yard. The scene was scary right out of a Western cowboy movie.
These fellows looked like they might shoot first, ask questions later, although no guns were in view. We turned onto a road leaving the farm and skedaddled out.
The stench of dead grasshoppers on the car was making us sick. In Maple Creek it cost almost $4 at the car wash to get rid of the stink.
It would be another 30 years until I saw the sand hills again. A friend and I did a day trip to Leader to view the sculptures of animals found in the sand hills — kangaroo rat, bobcat, burrowing owls, rattlesnake and deer.
From there we visited the museum at Lancer on Highway 32. Noting a sign pointing to the Great Sand Hills, we followed the roads right to the foot of the sand hills.
Greeting us was a string of old cowboy boots on a wooden post.
| Photo by Ron Walter
Ranchers in the area have kindly opened this trail so visitors can see the sights. We were careful to leave it as we found it.
We marvelled at the footprints in the huge swaths of sand — footprints that would disappear with the next breeze.
We didn’t see any wildlife but saw a depression with an interesting hole at the bottom — badger, snake, rat or what?
The way out wasn’t marked. We got lost.
On the way there we passed a large shallow lake with some factory-like buildings. They were the Ingebright Lake sodium sulphate plant, which closed when the salt ran out.
Ron Walter can be reached at [email protected]
