Hidden Gem: Wabigoon – Atikokan, June 21-23, 2023

On my various drives back and forth across Canada, I pass a lot of signs. So many signs. The best ones are the ones that advertise incongruent merchandise (“Nightcrawlers – Apple Pie”), but the most intriguing ones are those that make me wonder, “I wonder what that place is like?” The mystery of the unknown is infinitely alluring.

One of those signs was for The Historic Reesor Ranch, which appears along Hwy 1 near the Alberta-Saskatchewan border.  After first spying the sign in 2012, I finally paid the ranch a visit in 2018, satisfied my curiosity, and made some lovely new friends.

Another set of signs was for Atikokan, a town located in the right angle of a triangle formed by itself, Dryden, and Thunder Bay, signs which use phrases like (I’m probably paraphrasing because I’m too senile to remember exact wording) “Gateway to adventure”.  Year after year, I would drive past the signs, wondering what adventures I was missing.

When I was hitting the Google in the weeks before I set of on Road Trip 2023, I came across mention of Atikokan Equine Trail Riders, which described an equestrian camp and adjacent trails. Oh yeah, baby. I was in.

My route to Adventureland from the purgatorial bug-fest of Spruce Woods took me via one of my frequent and favourite layover spots, Merkel’s Camp on Lake Wabigoon.  I now have “my” spot at the fishing/hunting camp. At this summery time of year, especially compared to my rough-and-ready horse camps, the fish camp is an absolute resort.

After setting up Queen of the World’s e-fence corral, Spy and I headed down to the dock for some canine water sports.

It was 32C out. Once my pinging dog-ball of energy had been adequately deactivated, I took my own self back down to the dock for a long, cool swim in the lake. At this time of year, the evenings are long, and I had ample time to read my book and quaff a refreshing wine spritzer in the gazebo that overlooks the lake before heading back to my campsite to make myself a cold dinner. Way too hot to cook.

Merkel’s camp is popular with ‘Murcans who come up for the excellent fishing. Later in the evening, I met and chatted with Tim and Anne from Minnesota, who come up to the camp every year, and who go out fishing three times a day. Tim was kind enough to send me on my way with a couple fillets of freshly-caught walleye – my favourite lake fish.

The drive from Wabigoon to Atikokan is a short 2½-ish hour jaunt. I pulled in to the equestrian camp in the Charleson Recreation Area before noon, and was immediately met by Manager of Community Services Tom Hainey, who showed me the ropes. When I asked about trail maps, he waved to the hill across the lake with an airy 5-star review that the trails over in that direction were spectacular.

A town maintenance worker who came to turn on the water, and who walks his dogs on the trails, gave me more specific trail suggestions. Pai and I headed off with a vague route plan.

It’s been my experience that folks who use a trail system regularly are more confident about the adequacy of the official mapping than they should be. What seems obvious when you’ve used a trail network a few times can be utterly ambiguous when you’re using it for the first time. I’m going to say that it isn’t all that easy to get lost at Atikokan, but it’s worth noting that the available maps show many trails whose names don’t appear on the map, and that the named trails you ride on don’t always appear to exist on the map, and that some trails you run across neither appear on the map nor have a name sign. Even though I mostly knew roughly where I was and in which direction I was headed, I nevertheless ended up at a spot where I realized that what I thought was a trail on the map was actually a decommissioned railroad track. Stubborn as I am about backtracking, I decided to push on, and so we ended up riding quite a few km of suboptimal “trail” on rocky footing between railroad ties. Pai seemed far less annoyed than I was. Despite my poor map reading and trail choice, the ride was a beautiful one, the long stretch on railroad tracks not excepted.

Pretty little lake view.

Bad navigating on my part led to some suboptimal railway riding. I ❤️ my horse.

Upon our return to camp, in the sweltering heat, I unsaddled my gal and rode her bareback into the lake for a wash and a cool-down. Once again, I had camp to myself, and could let Pai wander loose to graze for a few hours before putting her to bed for the night in her pen. The stunning sunset was followed by a light-show provided by fireflies dancing in the grass.

Atikokan is a town of 2800 people, and yet it boasts an indoor pool, a 4-sheet curling rink, a hockey arena, a golf course, a motocross course, and a 35-km Nordic ski trail network. It calls itself the Canoe Capital of Canada, and its surrounding area has myriad lakes full of bass and walleye and trout and pike. And this. It has this equestrian camp with covered pens, high lines, water, picnic tables, flush toilets, and an outdoor shower. Amazing.

The place is truly a hidden gem. Go check it out.

Camp Notes for Horsey Folk:

The Atikokan camp is located in the Charleson Recreation Area and is across the road from the snowmobile clubhouse (Atikokan Sno-Ho). Cost was $26.25 for the night, payable by e-transfer. Do call to reserve/check availability, as Tom noted that it can be very busy.

Trails are mostly well-signed, and moderately well-mapped. They vary from winding single-track to wider two-track to gravel road to paved road. Trails are shared with hikers and mountain bikers. I met no one on my Thursday ride. Distance-wise, I’m going to say you could probably fill a long weekend’s worth of time riding, if you like 3-5 hour rides.

The camp has 15 pens, 11 of which are covered. Five of the covered stalls are roughly 10 x 20, and the others are roughly 10 x 10. The outdoor pens are roughly 10 x 20. There are also something like 7-9 highlines set up on poles. Portable corrals are allowed. There is water adjacent to the horse pens (I did not ask if it was potable).  

There is a washroom with flush toilets. There are two outdoor showers attached to the washroom building. Cell service in ca

Buggin: Stony Beach to Spruce Woods via Moose Mountain – June 18-20, 2023

Back in 2015, when I first met Doug and Rob and Marv and Warren, they mentioned that their private men’s club sometimes included a woman: from time to time, a Marjorie rode with them. A year later, I got to meet the famous Marjorie, and her other half Blair, and have run into them a few more times again over the years. They have always mentioned that if ever I needed a place to stay, they were right off the Trans Canada.

When I was planning out some tentative itineraries for this year’s trip, I thought that on the day I left Cypress, I might just give myself a cruise-y day: I’d pack up in a leisurely fashion, I’d restock my pantry in Maple Creek, and I’d truck my horsie a mere 2 ½ hrs down the road to the layover paddocks at Kinetic Park in Swift Current. But a few days before the end of my stay at Cypress Hills, Marjorie and Blair had re-issued their invitation to stay at their place, and so I managed to rise and shine and greet the day early enough to be pulling out of Cypress at 8:30 in the morning, behind Doug and Rob who were also headed home. At 9:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning, there would be no chance of grocery shopping in Maple Creek, but regardless of where I eventually stopped to buy food, I’d hit Kinetic Park by noon. There was little point in twiddling my thumbs in Swift Current for an entire half-day, so why not push on to the Moose Jaw/Regina area?

Also: I was feeling all teary and sad at leaving Cypress, and the thought of seeing familiar faces that evening made my heart a little happier.

A few miles away from Blair and Marjorie’s farm, just past Stony Beach, I pulled over to check my directions and make sure I was on the right track. I just happened to be parked in the driveway of the local Hutterite colony. Within approximately point four of a second, a passing truck stopped to see if I needed a hand. It was a Hutterite fella, and he was keen to chat. Asked me if I knew about Hutterites, talked to me about where in North America the colonies were dispersed, and told me that Blair and Marjorie (“the horse people”) were very good neighbours.

(Story later that evening from Blair: when the Hutterites first moved in, they came around to the farm trick or treating. Blair asked one little kid, as one does, what he was dressed as. The little boy answered: “A Hutterite.”)

Also, BTW: there is no beach at Stony Beach. There is no body of water at Stony Beach.

Pai was settled into a roomy pen for the night, and I got settled back in to civilization: a long hot shower, laundry, a glass of wine, a tasty dinner, and conversation into the evening with delightful company. At eighty-some years old, Blair is a prairie boy, but he spent years and years and years in the Maritimes, and, as do many Saskatchewanians, he reminds me of my uncles and cousins on PEI.

While we were all in Cypress, Marjorie had mentioned riding in a place called Kenosee, where a new horse camp had been set up by the equestrian trails. The fact that I’d never heard of it was a siren song to this girl who loves exploring new places. I checked the driving distance, and it was short enough to that I would be able to hop on the steed for an afternoon ride once I arrived.

Kenosee Lake is a low-key resort town, and Moose Mountain Provincial Park has lots of different campgrounds and facilities. Despite the place giving off the kind of vibe that makes a person nervous about all the camping spots being full, I was confident that my Monday arrival would assure me a campsite, and when I turned up at the equestrian camp, all was well: the camp was empty, and, aside from a half-dozen cars that checked the place out over the afternoon and evening, I had the place to myself the entire time I was there.

After a quick snack, I saddled up the gee gee, and we headed off. The Kenosee trails are cross-country ski trails that moonlight as horse trails, and as such they are wide, grassy bridle paths – truly a walk in the park. Our 16 km ride through hardwood forest took us through terrain that was winding and hilly, without any particularly taxing steep climbs. We skirted lake after lake, both large and small, with some of the trails offering views from above, and some skirting the lakeshore. Snowy white anemones were the predominant wildflower.

Grassy lanes at Moose Mountain Provincial Park

Lake/bog at Moose Mountain

The lake adjacent to camp. Loons were calling.

My next stop was Spruce Woods Provincial Park in Manitoba. I chose it because it was familiar and comfortable (Hot showers! Flush toilets!) and would be a layover that would allow my asthmatic horse to be outside in a roomy pen without me having to set up an e-fence corral, and which was close enough to Kenosee to make an afternoon post-arrival ride entirely feasible. It was all win, win, win.

The first time I heard about Spruce Woods, I was warned off visiting in June, as it was a buggy time of year. I ignored the advice and did a quick overnight reconnaissance to see whether I wanted to return for a longer stay in the fall. The bugs were utterly unimpressive.

This time…

It was like the time the mister and I were canoeing with my sis and her boyfriend on Great Central Lake on Vancouver Island, and, having read all the warnings about the wind coming up strong and dangerous in the middle of the day, we hugged the shoreline on our first two days of paddling. The water was like glass the entire time. On the third day, we decided that the warnings were vastly overstated, and we did our paddling well out from shore. The wind came up, the waves were massive, and we barely made shore without our canoes being swamped.

The warnings were, emphatically, not overstated.

The Spruce Woods bug situation was like that. I unloaded my horse, tossed her in a paddock, and she immediately lost her shit. (It should have been a clue that two of the three horses next to here were suited up in masks, boots, and fly sheets – that, and the fact that the one horse who was bare naked was running around his paddock like the devil was on his back). I grabbed her bug suit, and dressed her up and sprayed her down. She explained to me that my doing so made things marginally better, but that I was a total dick for bringing her here and she wasn’t sure we could be friends any more.

I collared a passing camper and asked her whether the bugs were bad out on the trail. With a haunted, shell-shocked look on her face like someone who has been fighting zombies 24/7 for the past week has just been asked if the monsters are bad today, she affirmed that yes, yes they were. They were very bad.

With what I think qualifies as admirable optimism, I got Pai geared up for the trail. Her tack included her fly mask and fly boots, and I bathed her in a soup of chemicals: fly spray and fly roll-on and Deep Woods Off adding up to 5 different purportedly effective repellent ingredients.

Geared up in the bug protection.

We headed out on what should have been a very easy, very pretty trip, and what ended up being one of the most thoroughly unpleasant rides I have ever been on. We rode a trail I only knew about thanks to talking to new friend Kristen last fall, and which is known to me inside my head as “Kristen’s River Trail”. About a kilometer out, things were so shite that I entertained the idea of turning back, but I thought, “Surely it will get better in the woods?” And it did. For ten minutes or so on a winding single-track I’d never been on before, the bugs left us alone and I thought we were in the clear. But that was it. For the rest of the ride, she tossed her head and shook her head and bit at her shoulders and stopped every few feet to kick at her belly.

Turns out, the bug situation in June had not been overstated.

Gorgeous trail, terrible ride.

I ain’t no entomology expert but in that bug-o-rama of All Things That Bite I can affirm the perpetrators of our assault included: horseflies, deer flies, stable flies, black flies, mosquitoes. Oh, and also ticks. Which don’t hurt when they bite but have got to be the creepiest and crawliest of all the creepy-crawlies you might discover on your person. I found three of them on me.

There was a thunderstorm warning for the Park that night. My phone weather app was suggesting that winds could be 100km/hr, hail could be the size of baseballs, and the rain could be torrential. I yet again sought intel from a fellow camper (and endurance rider), Natasha. “How seriously do you take these warnings?” I asked. “Well,” she said, “I don’t think it’s going to be southern US twister material…” but she did think that moving my rig from the wide open to a spot under the trees might be wise given the risk of hail.

I was glad I’d moved when the first hail fell and was the size of raspberries – having once had my roof vent smashed by prairie hail, I have a lot of respect for prairie thunderstorms. But that little hurrah was it for the hail that night. The storm put on a very impressive light show, and at one point the rain did hammer down for a while – you could hear it coming like a freight train for minutes before it hit, that’s how heavy it was – but all in all, it was a bit of a fizzler.

The warnings were definitely overstated.

Camp Notes for Horsey Folk

Moose Mountain Provincial Park (Kenosee)

The equestrian campground at Moose Mountain Provincial Park has about six pipe corrals of varying size – some could easily accommodate two horses, one is only about 10’x10′. There is a pit toilet and non-potable water; there is also a large shelter with a wood stove, a picnic table, and a pile of firewood.

There are no designated campsites, but I figure about 5 rigs could fit in the level area parallel to the pens, and maybe another 1-2 in the grassy middle of the driveway circle. There are two fire/barbecue stands at one side of camp adjacent to a concrete pad, with a single picnic table between them. There is a manure area right by the pens, with a wheelbarrow (no fork).

Once you get out of camp (via what looks like a relatively newly cut trail) and into the actual trail system, the trails are well-signed. They are very wide, and footing is excellent. There’s enough distance there to maybe spend a long weekend riding – the out-and-back from camp is about 2.5 km each way.

Cost is $20/night.

Spruce Woods Provincial Park

For information on Spruce Woods, my most recent post here has links to earlier camp descriptions (scroll down to Camp Notes). Descriptions are still accurate.

Here, Kitty Kitty (or, There’s Lions in Them Thar Hills) – Cypress Hills, June 8-18, 2023

A coupla weeks ago, I started to write a post entitled “The Beginning of the End?” because that’s how Road Trip 2023 was looking to me. Pai’s various medical issues were seeing me set off with a horse who wasn’t going to be up to tackling those South Saskatchewan hills, a horse who now came complete with a meds list that would rival the pharmaceutical stash of a live-fast, die-young rock star itching to get hopped up and trash some $1200/night hotel room.

But that post was depressing to write, and was depressingly boring to read.

So scrap that.

Let’s talk about cougars instead.

Back in 2015, on one of my first rides in Cypress Hills with Doug and Rob (known to all my friends as The Cowboys), their route included a trip to the Cougar Caves, and I was informed that Cypress Hills has the highest density of cougars in North America.

“Nay, nay,” thought I, “That statistic belongs to Vancouver Island.” Vancouver Island unabashedly touts itself as the cougar capital of Canada: of the roughly 4000 mountain lions in Canada, 3500 live in BC, and 800 of those live on Vancouver Island, a rock that is only a tiny percentage of BC’s land mass.  If you do the math, it works out to about 2.5 cougars per 100 km2. While these big cats will occasionally stroll into people’s back yards – and once, memorably, in 1992, into the Empress Hotel in downtown Victoria – they do live up to their rep of being “elusive”. While bear sightings on Vancouver Island are a dime a dozen, it is a rare day when you get to see a cougar.

But as it happens, the wee Interprovincial Park that is Cypress Hills actually does have a higher density of cougars than Vancouver Island, by far: at last count, it was 8.5 cougars per 100 km2. And yet, just like on Vancouver Island, they are rarely seen. Because they’re elusive.

So it is understandable that, on my first ride of the season with the boys, when we were gearing up to get back in the saddle after our lunch break, and our horses pricked up their ears and turned their heads and alerted us to a pair of approaching four-leggeds, my first thought was, “Oh! Coyotes!” Coyotes are not elusive.

Pai wasn’t with me on this ride. Before leaving Nanaimo, I had let Rob know that Pai’s soundness wasn’t 100%, and that I might join them in camp for a few days on Road Trip 2023 only to hang out and hike with the dog before carrying on east. Doug phoned me a few days before he and Rob were headed out, saying, “I hear that pony of yours isn’t sound. It’s just as easy for me to throw three horses on the trailer as two if you want me to bring you a horse to ride.” So I had been looking between the black ears of Doug’s horse  Ace rather than between Pai’s white ones, and I had just taken his hobbles off after our lunch break when the two surprise visitors appeared on the horizon.

My sluggish brain eventually re-interpreted what my eyes were seeing, and I said to Rob, who was still un-hobbling his horse, “Cats! Look Rob! Those are cats!” One cougar quickly slunk away the way it had come, but his friend paused and stared at us. I whipped out my phone to snap a photo before the cougar turned and ran and all I would have for a pic would be an unimpressive blurry ass end and a tail.

The mountain lion did not turn and run.

He kept walking towards us. Pleased, I snapped another photo.

He kept coming.

I put my phone away, not in small part because it would be just too Darwin Award-y to be found dead but in possession of an excellent close-up photo of a cougar preparing to leap.

He kept walking towards us.

Slowly. And with what looked like an alarming amount of purpose.

I let out my best animalistic roar and raised my hands above my head. (For the visual, picture trying to convince a five-year-old that you are a creepy monster and you are about to GET them, bwa ha ha ha).

He kept walking towards us. (For the visual, imagine that you tried the creepy monster pose on a fourteen-year-old bored AF kid, who is now giving you the “I bet that was embarrassing” withering dismissal).

I hollered at him to BACK OFF!!! with all the rage of a Bichon owner in pristine Louis Vitton snatching up her snow-white darling and bellowing at a muddy Labrador Retriever about to get overly friendly with the both of them.

The cougar kept walking towards us. This kitty had clearly not read the Cypress Hills tips on how he should be responding to my by-the-book cougar deflection techniques.

I stomped my foot like an angry doe and hollered a few more times.

After pausing at a distance of 10 or 12 paces, when I was out of ideas on how to repel a stalking cat and was becoming quite disturbed at how ineffectual my efforts had been, he finally turned 90 degrees and sauntered off all non-chalant towards a wooded coulee.

Doug, a few hundred feet away, had been opening a gate, and only noticed that a mountain lion was within pouncing distance when he heard my ruckus. “I think that cat growled at you,” he joked.

My grainy photos became the talk of the camp. Alas, I keep imagining how great the pics would have been had I not lost my cool and continued my photo shoot right until the point where he was eyeing me up for lunch.

The remaining 9 of my 10 days at Cypress were cougar-free and therefore comparatively ho-hum.

My time there was, as always, delightful. Cypress Hills has not only some of the most spectacular riding in Canada, but also has the absolute best camp, full of people who are old friends or soon-to-be new friends. When I rolled in, not only were Rob and Doug present, but so were Carol and Con, whom I’d met in 2015 and at least once or twice after that, and Jim and Cindy, whom I’d met at both Cypress and Spruce Woods.  Later in the week, friends Marjorie and Blair and Fay and Larry and Randy all turned up. The familiar faces of the Park staff – Marilyn and Mel – were there, as well as the new young Ranger Leanne, who happened to be the daughter of Theresa and Scotty Reesor. It was the usual Old Home Week, with gatherings at the central fire pit at night.

For most of my stay, I rode with Rob and Doug alone. We took our horses up steep hills, back and forth across Battle Creek, up to the tops of the ridges, and down into the valleys. We rode in open pine woods and in brushy spruce forest and through stands of poplar.

We rode through purple and blue swaths of larkspur, creamy white carpets of death camas, bright yellow meadows of arnica. It had rained copiously in the weeks prior, and the wildflowers were putting on their best show – the grasslands were painted by rose, vetch, buffalo beans, avens, flax, geranium, and dozens of other flowers. I counted fourteen different species in bloom at just one of our lunch spots.

As we rode, the scent of wolf willow was heavy in the air. Clouds of tiny blue butterflies would flutter up at the creek crossings. Dragonflies darted and hovered. Every so often, deer would bound across a hillside, their white tails raised like flags.

I have always admired Ace, and last year, when Doug and I traded mounts for the day, his horse and I got on well together.  It’s a rare day when I enjoy riding someone else’s horse as much as I enjoy riding my own, but on this trip, Ace more than made up for me having to leave my girl back in camp. My good (borrowed) boy – who never gets spoiled by the very business-like Doug – has gone back home with a new taste for granola bars.

And I did take Pai out for some easy rides on the flat every second day, just to be looking at the hills between those white ears again.

Perfect.

Camp Notes for Horsey Folk

I’ve described the camp at Cypress several times – the most recent article is here (scroll down to Camp Notes for links to previous posts). The price in 2023 is still $20/night.

In short, there are roughly 10 roomy pipe fence corrals, about eight small wooden corrals, and maybe a dozen or 16 tie stalls. There is a catch large catch pen fenced with barbed wire where you can either turn your horse loose, or set up an e-fence corral.

There is limited potable water for humans, and horse get watered at the creek. There is a very clean pit toilet, a central fire pit, and firewood is included. There are about 17 campsites that each have a picnic table and fire stand, but if camp is full, no one will turn you away – I have camped there when there have been 30 rigs on site.

Hay is not allowed – you must feed cubes, which are available from the Ranger station at an entirely reasonable $18/50 lb bag (on Vancouver Island, I pay around $26 for a 44 lb bag, so I consider the Cypress price to be an absolute steal).

Some of the best trails are not on the map, so if you can find someone familiar with the area to tag along with, you will get some great rides in.

The road in and out is impassible after a heavy rain.