journey east: day 11 - part two

The second of three parts. This was a really full day for me. It was my intention to visit a few specific areas along the way and immerse myself in them with the aim of later writing travel pieces on them. Southeastern Alberta was one of my focuses. However, my notes have since been misplaced and the prospect of writing about them, beyond these pages, is vastly diminished.

By the time I finished my day, at Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park, I was pretty done in and the prospect of touring the area for fact-finding just wasn't doing it for me. It also didn't help that though the weather was fine - sunny and hot - I was still early in the tourist season. Most places I visited, not just in Alberta but on my entire journey, were pretty empty of activity.

June 12, 2006

Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park lies in the Milk River Valley and appears almost out of nowhere on Alberta's southern plains. Driving across the prairies through flat fields of farmland and sagebrush and suddenly the road dropped down over a ridge and into what looked like the largest termite colony in the world.


Hoodoos at Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park.

Hoodoos. A collection of striated pillars of sandstone worn away by meltwater 15 millennia ago when the glaciers last retreated from the area. The hoodoos run for miles following the valley of the Milk River. The park gets its name from pictographs depicting moments and events of the Blackfoot indians. The pictographs are painted images, but there are also images called petroglyphs carved into the soft stone. The images are crude and some are more than 1,000 years old. The Battle Scene is the most elaborate of the petroglyphs, covers a couple square metres of stone and has more than 130 figures in it.

It's a remarkable, magical place to explore. The Blackfoot refer to it as a living outdoor cathedral. Writing-on-Stone is a priceless part of the area's heritage. The tragic irony, and perhaps most frustrating element of the park, is the level of vandalism by those who get some joy from carving their initials or names into the stone. A shining example of this is at the Battle Scene. The dominant carved feature isn't the Battle Scene itself, but someone's initials carved deep and bold just inches above it. To protect it from further damage there is now an unsightly steel-mesh grating surrounding the scene. Aaargh, grating indeed. Posted throughout the park are signs warning against defacing the stone - $50,000 penalty - but, something tells me there have been few convictions.

Also in the park, but in a restricted zone on the other side of the Milk River, is an old North West Mounted Police outpost. This early in the season the park wasn't yet offering tours of the area. However, being early in the season also meant fewer people. In fact, almost no people.



I went for a hike along the Hoodoo Trail. It wanders through hoodoos for close to a kilometre, then dips down to river level where it takes a meandering trip through dense brush on the river's flood plain. The trail then heads back to higher ground, ending at the Battle Scene. Turkey vultures, swallows, magpies(lots of magpies,) pelicans and deer call the area home. The air is alive with birdsong.

I have made the point before that I was travelling just weeks before kids were let out of school bringing on the full onset of the tourist season. I was at the shoulder of the shoulder season. My timing presented problems and opportunities. One of the problems was the lack of information at many of the sites I visited. At Writing-on-Stone there was only one person available to talk to and she wasn't on site. I had to travel to an administration area of the park, after I'd finished wandering the park, to meet and speak with her. And of course I wouldn't get a tour of the restricted area because it wasn't open yet.

On the other hand, I pretty much had the park to myself. When I arrived there was a school group wandering one area of the park. But within an hour all the 'tweens piled on their tour bus and were gone. The parking lot was mostly empty and the only sounds were made by animals and the wind.


The Milk Rivers runs through Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park.

As I walked the park I understood why the Blackfoot held the area with such reverence. Aisinai pi - where the drawings are - has been visited by the Blackfoot for thousands of years. It's a holy place. Walking through the silent corridors created by hoodoos and coulees I felt those thousands of years of lore, magic, and history, crawl up my spine with a tingle. It's a sense of context I don't think I could have experienced had I not been alone in my visit.

From Writing-on-Stone I turned north toward foremost. Foremost is not much of a town in terms of size. One section of road with commercial and government operations on both sides, and the ubiquitous small-town manner of parking on a slant. I parked in front of The Liquor Cabinet, which was closed, as in no longer in operation, and popped into The Liquor Store which was right next door. I bet that was a good drag-em down fight for market dominance. The store was spacious with booze spread thinly along metal shelves. The prices were high, so I left.

I went a couple of doors down to a 'cafe' where I bought the most expensive cup of coffee of my life: $3.00. Now this wasn't some yuppie coffee brewed from beans predigested by apes and slowly roasted for 50 years to the exacting standards of the Juan Valdez credo. This was coffee brewed in Foremost and served by a girl who based her pricing on an estimation of how much coffee my portable mug held. I'm happy to report the coffee didn't suck, it was in fact quite nice and far exceeded my expectations. But, it was not a $3.00 cup of coffee.

Tomorrow, Etzikom and photos from the roadside.