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.

Winter is Coming: Pilot Butte-Maple Creek, October 22-25, 2022

Given that my home address is the temperate rainforest of Vancouver Island, more often than not, on my travels across Canada, I get taken for a chick who has lived her life blissfully unscathed by firsthand experience of Real Canadian Winter. And when you top off my lotus-land postal code with a shameless propensity for February Facebook posts that feature green grass and a whole lotta flowers, even people I’ve know for a couple of decades sometimes treat me like I was born and raised in the Canuckian version of the tropics.

My Vancouver Island lawn in February, 2022

Dudes. I grew up wearing a snowsuit under my Halloween costume. I broke icicles off the eaves and sucked on them like they were popsicles (or, more often, used them as weapons in a kinda-sorta-maybe-not fair fight with the younger sibs while we all waited for Mum after Sunday church). I know the agony of being too young to have a choice about the wisdom of family Rideau Canal expeditions in temperatures vastly below zero, and of having your ice-cube toes warm up once you pry them out of your skates at -18C. I grew up in a place where the car got plugged in overnight. I took Driver’s Ed in January, when the roads were crapsicles.

If you know, you know. And I know.

When you grow up somewhere in Canada that has actual winter with months and months of windchill and ice and glittery snow that squeaks when you walk on it… you can’t get it out of you. Much as you might claim to hate it, you can’t get it out of you. It is yours, and you are its.

So: I miss winter.

For about 5 seconds every year.

I definitely don’t miss winter enough to be pleased when winter decides that October is a good time to get lit: Go home, winter. You’re drunk.

When I rolled out of the horse camp at Spruce Woods, MB, on October 22^nd, where it had been T-shirt weather for 3 days straight, I was headed for my friend Dawn’s place in Pilot Butte, just a few km east of Regina. I’d first met Dawn at Cypress Hills back in 2015, and three years later, I’d rung her up, out of the blue, to take her up on her now stale-dated offer of road-tripping accommodation (“Hey-ey! Remember me, the gal with The Worst Dog in the World, from Cypress?”). She’d been game, and we’d had a blast during what had morphed from a one-night stay into a four-day extravaganza of fun. Now again, four years later, I was about to throw myself on her doorstep, this time for a quick overnighter en route to some sweet fall riding in Cypress Hills.

Hahahahahaha.

The best-laid plans, and all that.

Admittedly, I did know that the forecast was calling for snow. I had seen the prediction on my weather app, but  what I had visualized had been the same sort of photogenic sugar-dusting I’d encountered in Northern Ontario: very pretty, utterly unproblematic. And the forecast truly did remain benign for way longer than it should have. It was only very late in the day when folks (not me: I was oblivious) began to refer to the prophesied snowfall as “The Storm”. (As in, when Dawn was out shopping the afternoon of my arrival, cashiers were all like: “So, you ready for THE STORM?”)

I arrived in Pilot Butte on a nice fall day. I parked my horse in the riding ring. Dawn and the fam and I ate and drank and made merry. I marveled at the change in the kids who were now doing ridiculous things like driving cars and having jobs.

We went to bed.

And in the morning, it was winter.

Pai’s body language seems pretty clear: “This is bullshit.”

Not just introductory level winter (you know, the have-an-inch-of-snow-that-will-melt-by-noon, baby winter). Nope. We were in full-on, overachiever level winter.

It wintered that day, and it wintered the next day, and it continued to winter for a seriously unreasonable amount of time for October. While my friends on Vancouver Island and PEI and Ontario were all, “It’s 24C!” and “Most amazing October ever!” and “Pool is still open!”, south Saskatchewan became a little Twilight Zone of snowy End Times. The roads were closed in all directions out of Regina, with photos appearing on news sites and on social media of stranded trucks lined up at the side of the highway. Dawn, who had had to depart on a trip north for work, phoned me an hour out: “There are cars in the ditch everywhere and you couldn’t PAY me to take a horse trailer on these roads. STAY WHERE YOU ARE!”

Red means closed, white means travel not recommended, and yellow means winter driving conditions. (Photo courtesy Highway Hotline)

Pilot Butte got off relatively lightly, with local roads being safe to travel early on in the game, to the extent that I began to wonder whether my decision to shelter in place and keep my rig off the road wasn’t just a manifestation of me being a total puss. As a result of my anxiety about potentially overstaying my welcome, I phoned up a trail riding friend in Moose Jaw, an hour down the road, and asked her whether she would consider hauling through the weather conditions in her area. Her response: “We have 18 inches of snow out here and the power is off and crews can’t get where they need to go because people are stuck on the roads.”

So we stayed. And stayed. And stayed.

Tiny little flakes continued to fall, relentlessly.

No matter the weather, dogs still need to be walked. The Worst Dog in the World gives no fucks about snow. Loves it, in fact. With the wind howling across the flatlands and with ice pellets stinging what little skin I left exposed, the pooch and I had far too many incredibly craptastic walks in abysmally arctic weather.

Spy’s body language, on the other hand: ” THIS. IS. AMAZING!!!!”

My longer-than-anticipated stay with Dawn’s ever-accommodating other half, Ken, and their always-delightful kids Falynn and Myles, eventually came to a close, and, finally, two days later than planned, my critter crew and I gingerly got our show on the road.

For the record: tier 3 of Saskatchewan’s official road conditions, the apparently acceptable “Icy” (number 1 being “Closed” and number 2 being “Travel not recommended”), is still utter shite when you are hauling. Between Regina and Moose Jaw, there was a lumpy-bumpy unpredictably-located 6-inch shelf of ice in either one lane or the other. Suddenly, with no warning, your lane would become a death trap.

Winter driving conditions.

Aahhh, yes. Making memories.

My next stop after Pilot Butte was Maple Creek, SK, where the snow had mercifully melted, and where I would be checking in with my friends Denise and Kathy.

On the evening of my arrival in Maple Creek, Denise scooped me up from my digs for a gourmet dinner at her place. It’s a rare day when my veg-head picky-eater proclivities get met with any kind of like-minded menu, but Denise and Kathy grow All the Good Things on their “town” property, both indoors and out, including a hydroponic set-up in the basement. Ermagawd but I had a great meal, enhanced by great company. I’d crossed paths with Denise and Kathy earlier in the summer on their trip to PEI, when they made a point of coming to cheer Sporty on as I drove her at the matinee harness races. We’d not had time to do much catching up then, so we made up for it over the course of the evening.

Pai appreciating the paucity of snow in her Maple Creek paddock.

On my various visits to Cypress Hills, I’d always driven past an intriguing little venue on Hwy 724 that is signposted “Ghostown Blues”. The discovery that my Juno-nominated musician friend, David Gogo, had played and stayed at this cluster of antique shepherd’s wagons and heritage buildings compounded my interest. On this trip, my original plan for my overnight in Maple Creek had been to camp at the local rodeo grounds, but, in a happy bit of serendipity, I ended up with an offer of horsey accommodation from Mel, the Cypress Hills park ranger.

Whose property, I discovered when I rolled in, encompasses Ghostown Blues.

How cool is that?

One of the painstakingly restored buildings at Ghostown Blues.

The genie behind the now-closed former B&B and concert venue is Mel’s other half, Greg. Before I left, Greg showed me around his place, including “the Church” which showcases his collection of veterinary  artifacts.

I was fascinated. So fascinated was I, that I lost track of the whereabouts of The Worst Dog in the World, who’d been left outside to his own devices. My phone rang. This is how the phone call went:

Me (unknown number but Maple Creek area code, thinking it was Mel): enthusiastic “Hi!”

Caller: “I have your dog with me.”

Spy’s dog tag has my phone number on it.

Me (thinking, Ah, he’s joined you, Mel, and your so-much-fun dogs on your run, hope that’s cool with you): still very enthusiastic “Okay!”

Caller: “Where are you?”

Me: “I’m here at the Church with your husband.”

Caller: “No.”

Pause. Me: “?”

Caller: “I’m the neighbour. Your dog is in with my cows.”

Thankfully, when I charged out of the church, the Worst Dog in the World was booking it back home before my COME THE FUCK HERE whistle even slipped past my lips.

Two feet of snow in the hills had put the kibosh on my plan to head down to the equestrian camp at Cypress, and so we left Maple Creek with nothing more ambitious on our agenda than a visit with my friend Vanessa’s family in nearby Taber, AB.

COVID, Loss, and Cypress Hills 2021 – June 15-28, 2021

Waaaaay back when – well before I started all this equine road tripping business – there was THE horse, and then there were three “other” horses. THE horse was Fred, a Standardbred I’d met when he was four, a horse I had eventually bought when he was seven and ready to quit the track. The “other” horses were Phabulous, a flamboyant one-eyed Oldenberg dressage horse who was far more talented than this rider is; Alf, the big orange off-track Thoroughbred I had known since the day he was born; and Paikea, the young up-and-coming who at that time had not yet grown into her Queen of the World persona. Four was a ridiculous number of horses to keep ridden for a person who was working more or less full-time.

Alf, Fred, and Pai

I buried Fred, the horse of my heart, in 2012, at the age of 30. Phab, my gorgeous, good-natured warmblood, had died in 2011. The shrinking herd took on a much more reasonable magnitude of two: Paikea, and the chronically soundness-challenged Alf.

Just as it was for so many riders across the country, 2020 was for me a total bust when it came to anything other than solo rides handy home. My grand vision of taking Pai to PEI, as I had in 2019 and 2012, gasped its last and died a sad death right around April last year.

Probably like many other equestrians, early on in the pandemic, when the message was to avoid engaging in high-risk activities that might see a horse-induced head trauma take a hospital bed away from a COVID patient, I questioned whether I should even be riding. I stopped going out into the backwoods on my own.  The provincial park next door to the barn closed down, and I stopped riding off-property. After a stellar April, the weather turned dismal in May, and I stopped riding at all. In the frigid, relentless rain, the grass kept growing. While I was looking the other way, my usually meticulously-managed but now-idle insulin-resistant horse got fat, and foundered on that late lush grass.  Riding was taken off the table entirely for months, while she recovered.

Despite having the physique of a pin-up boy, Alf, the spare horse, had the constitution of a teacup poodle. He would injure himself at the drop of a hat and, over the 18-ish years that I owned him, had been a complete and utter dud as the back-up horse he was intended to be. He was a joy to ride, and yet was almost never sound for more than a few months. He had anxiety issues and intensely disliked being alone. In short, he bit cock as an understudy. I loved him to pieces. But I rarely rode him, and the Pai-less period of that COVID summer was no exception. I was grounded. 

The beautiful, rarely sound Alf

Despite some early optimism on my part that summer 2021 would redeem the postponed 2020 X-Canada road trip, various provincial lockdowns and travel restrictions in the spring suggested that setting out with a dog and a horse across the land of quarantines was once again likely be ill-advised. I was bummed.

On the brighter side, my beloved Saskatchewan cowboys sent word that they were still planning their annual late-June trip to Cypress Hills, and it initially looked like a quick out-and-back trip to SK might be safely do-able. 

And then Alf came up lame. And not just lame. What initially appeared to be a typical, run-of-the-mill Alf-esque sole abscess became more clearly defined as a perfect storm of hyperadrenocorticism (Cushing’s), sole abscess on one foot, and laminitis with imminently catastrophic rotation on the other front foot. His health situation was too precarious for me to bugger off and leave in someone else’s care. Cypress was off the table.

After weeks of me sticking ineffectual thumbs in Alf’s various medical dykes, that mother of a sole abscess – despite a prolonged course of antibiotics – progressed to osteomyelitis (bone infection) on the less foundered foot.

The Big Orange Horse was done.

The Big Orange Horse.

Pai, my independent girl who had always displayed a violent disdain for most horses, had shown a somewhat unexpectedly intense level of depression at the loss of her lifelong friend. The metamorphosis of my big, beautiful, sweet horse into an ex-horse meant a last-minute trip to Cypress Hills had reared its head again as a possibility, and getting Pai off the farm for a spell seemed like a good idea. A week of scrambling ensued: get the truck serviced. Get the trailer serviced. Fix the things that needed fixing. Replace the things that needed replacing. Buy the things that needed buying.

My usually languid journey out to Cypress became a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’m two-day trip with an overnight in Golden. Cresting the hill that drops you down into the equestrian camp at Cypress usually gives me the same soaring lift of spirit as does cresting the bridge to PEI. But this year, when I was pulling in to the rodeo grounds in Golden, I had gotten word that my sweet, amazing veterinary colleague of 21 years had, despite winning her fight with an aggressive cancer, died the morning before, from a completely unrelated cancer. The next day, as I took in that first view at Cypress over Baldy and the hills south of camp, I asked myself, “How do you feel right now?” Between the double hit of the death of my horse and the death of my friend, the answer was, “Pretty sure I don’t feel anything at all.”

When I arrived, all the pens were full, as were all the small stalls. Even the less attractive tie-stalls were half-occupied. I quickly set up an e-corral in the catch pen, and as I did, I was greeted by Brenda. “Hey, bitch!” we hollered at the same time. Other familiar faces popped over soon after, and, though all the campsites were occupied, Brenda’s hot tip about her neighbour imminently leaving meant I could hang out like a vulture by their spot until they departed, which also meant I was ultimately camped between Brenda and Greg on one side, and my boys Doug and Rob as well as Glen from the Wood Mountain Wagon Train on the other.  My friend Pam from the 2019 Writing-on-Stone and Ya Ha Tinda trips pulled in right about the same time I did, and settled in with a crew that included Rick and Jane, the folks I’d joined on the 2019 cattle drive. It was like a family reunion.

The thing about Cypress is that it is good for the soul and good for the spirit. It’s a good place to be when your heart hurts.

Even though I am not a natural early riser (consider: my usual routine is to have a latte delivered to me in bed by my loving man at 7:00 am, and to maybe consider throwing off the bedcovers around 8:30 or 9:00), at Cypress, I’m up and about by 5:30. This preposterously chipper get-out-of-bed situation is necessitated by the need to (a) do horse chores and (b), more importantly, imbibe a sufficient quantity of caffeine prior to heading out on a brisk daily 6:30 a.m. morning walk with Doug and the ever-rambunctious Spy the Dog. Being one of the first people up and about in camp is actually a very pleasing thing. The mourning doves are calling. There is frost on the grass. The horses nicker softly as you approach. No one has yet fired up their generator. The sky is bright behind the hill that sits to the north of camp, and before long, sunlight starts to bathe the camp.

Morning coffee in camp.

Before long, other campers are out and about feeding their beasts, and setting out their camp chairs in the sun to sit and chat with a cup of coffee. Breakfasts get eaten and more coffee gets drunk, and eventually horses get saddled up and folks hit the trail.

This year was my sixth trip to Cypress. I generally tend to pat myself on the back for having an excellent sense of direction, but at Cypress, one meadow looks pretty much exactly like the next. One deke into the poplars looks like another. One plateau looks exactly the same as the one across the coulee. At Cypress, I have typically had only a general sense of which direction we’ve ridden, and only a faint hope of being able to find the same route on my own. This year, I finally got my shit together and downloaded Caltopo, an excellent mapping App recommended by one of my Back Country Horsemen buddies. Though the boys were initially dismissive of my technology, I have to say that a most satisfying expression of interest in distance ridden and elevation gained was shown at the end of that first ride and every ride thereafter.

Our 20 km loops.

We hit the usual suspects – the Mystery Rocks, the Cougar Caves, High Vista, the Ridge Trail, the Bug Trail, Fort Walsh – but also rode some valleys and ridges I’d not seen before.

As time wore on, our group slowly dwindled, until, for the last two or three days, it was just me and the boys. And then, after a solid two weeks of daily 12-mile rides, and lazy afternoon beers, and group dinners, and swims in the creek, and evening guitar-playing around the campfire, Cypress 2021 was over. It was time for Rob to head back to Calgary and Doug to move east to ride at Grasslands with his family. Despite having been extended a very tempting invite to follow Doug there, my practical side uncharacteristically won out, and I packed up by bags and picked up my tent, and headed back to my man on Vancouver Island.

Camp Notes for Horsey Folk:

I’ve described the equestrian camp at Cypress a couple of times – in 2015, and an update in 2019. Since then, a cell tower has been installed, which means you no longer have to drive up the road or climb a high hill in order to call home (I chose to pretend there was still no service, and set my phone to airplane mode). Camping is still a super-reasonable $20 for you and your horse, which includes firewood.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned before, but Cypress is bear-free. There are cats around, but that fact won’t alter your camp behaviour the way bears would.

One great thing about Cypress is that you will not be turned away, even if camp is full. The campground was insanely full for a few days during my stay: there are 17 designated campsites with picnic tables and barbecues, and for a couple of days, there were 30 rigs in camp, with 55 horses on site. It’s reassuring to know that you can arrive at a place, and not find yourself scrambling to implement a Plan B.

That said, there is the definite possibility that on a busy week, there will be no pen for you. If you’re cool with a tie stall or turning your horse out in the catch pen with a mob, more power to you. If not, make sure you bring along the necessities for setting up an e-corral.

I have also probably not mentioned that there’s this crazy hill going down into camp. It is a shit-show after a heavy rain – just don’t even. (I did, and barely lived to tell the tale).