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.

My Road Leads into the Desert: Dryden-Spruce Woods, October 18-22, 2022

“It’s perfect: just when team penning ends for the summer, the fall trail riding season starts.” So said my new friend Kristen as we chatted about all things horse while camping at Spruce Woods Provincial Park in Manitoba. It was the first time I had ever considered trail riding to be a primarily autumnal activity, but in this neck of the woods, it made sense: once the weather turns its thoughts to winter, the bugs tend to get out of Dodge. And the Spruce Woods bugs are legend – when I’d originally been told about the equestrian camp there, I’d been forewarned: DO NOT GO IN SUMMER. In that buzzy, bitey, slappy corner of the world, trail riding is indeed a dish best served cold.

I’d entertained various options for camping and hitting the trail in Manitoba – Riding Mountain National Park, Sandilands Provincial Forest, Spruce Woods Provincial Park – but in the end, Spruce Woods won the day. The park encompasses the Carberry Sandhills (aka the Spirit Sands), an area of desert-like inland sand dunes that are the remnants of an ancient river delta, and which have been considered sacred by the Anishinaabe people for thousands of years.  As I wound my way west across Northern Ontario, I was looking forward to the chance to once again ride through those otherworldly dunes.

Clocking in at under four hours, the drive from Thunder Bay to Dryden is a relatively short one, meaning my critter posse and I could have a fairly relaxed start to the day and still arrive in camp at Lake Wabigoon with plenty of daylight left. As it had been with the campgrounds I’d stayed at thus far, Merkel’s Camp was closed for the season, but Terry and Merrill were nevertheless happy to welcome me back to “my” spot at their camp. Since the campground was empty, I ended up shifting to a new site that featured a lake view.

Pai chilling in her e-corral at Merkel’s Camp, Lake Wabigoon, ON

Terry delivered a pile of firewood to my site, and after setting Pai up in her e-fence corral on ground that had a dusting of snow over it, I enjoyed a relaxed fireside beer as the sun went down over the water.

Lake Wabigoon sunset

When the sun rose again the next morning, the air outside – and hence, the air inside – was a crispy -7C, calling for the addition of footwarmers to my stylish daybreak camp ensemble. Sporting five layers on top, two down below, two pairs of socks, camo-patterned winter duck-hunting gloves, and my Moth Lane toque, in record time I made my morning coffee, shoveled down a bowl of hot instant oatmeal, and broke camp.

Over the course of the 540 km drive between the one camp to the next, the temperatures rose steeply from glacial to legit balmy. Pumping gas just south of Winnipeg, I fairly roasted in my long underwear. By the time I pulled in to the Spruce Woods equestrian camp, the truck thermometer was reading 17C.

The campground was eerily empty. I had my pick of the corrals and the campsites, and Spy the Dog had the run of the place until darkness fell and the coyotes began to yip from what seemed like unnervingly close range – I was 100% certain that, left to the mercy of his own questionable decision-making skills, he’d let himself be lured into the woods to be devoured by the ravening hordes.

Sunrise at Spruce Woods, the Barn camp.

Sometimes, the best trails are the ones that aren’t on the map. As Pai and I made our way along the park’s wide, grassy and sandy trails, through a landscape that was shades of gold and grey and green and black, striped with the snow-white trunks of birch, I spotted a narrow, un-mapped single-track that disappeared into the trees. Trails like that are a siren call to me, and so into the woods we went. The winding path led us down towards the Assiniboine River, and eventually brought us to the second (“Canoe”) equestrian campground, which was just as silent and desolate on this fall day as was the barn campground. Another snaking single-track led us back up to the tableland.

Assiniboine River at the Canoe camp.

Lunch break.

When darkness falls early, and the temperatures drop precipitously as soon as the sun goes down, there is little incentive to hang around outside once dinner is done. Following the day’s 20-km ride, the evening’s activities – walking the dog, cooking dinner, and some loud and terrible singing and guitar-playing by my campfire – were pretty much over by 8pm, and I retired to my solitary camper for the night. I was just about to hit the hay at 9pm when I was startled by the sound of a vehicle rolling in: we had company. Two gals had arrived with a couple of horses they settled into the paddock alongside Pai.

I got the chance to chat with my new neighbours, team penners Kirsten and Sandra, before hitting the trail the next morning.Their plan for the day included the same Holy Grail riding quest that mine did: find a very particular but elusive sand dune trail, one which, as far as the map was concerned, did not exist. I knew the trail existed, because I’d been on it in 2018. They knew the existed, because they’d heard tell of it from others who had been there.

We exchanged ideas. I had a gut feeling about the general area where the dunes should be. Kristen’s intel suggested that the trail was in a similar area code. While a park staffer I had interrogated the day before had had zero idea what I was talking about (and, I believe, may have thought I was a crazy person when I described it), a second park dude I’d chatted to that very morning had given me a fairly clear picture of where he thought the trail could be found. Between us, we figured we had a likely trailhead location narrowed down.

Given that these gals had been to Spruce many times before, I also asked them what might be their favourite ride in the park. Kristen described a not-on-the-books route that followed the Assiniboine and climbed back onto the plateau, and so I planned my day’s ride to include what would, with any luck, be the secret sand dune trail, and a trip home that would catch Kristen’s off-piste route along the river.

As it turned out, the dune trailhead was exactly as described by Park Guy numero deux, and we rode along the tops of towering sand dunes and down into their valleys.

My 30-km ride and late afternoon dog walk were rounded out by an evening around the campfire with Kristen and Sandra. While I like chatting with all of the different folks I meet at horse camps, one thing I particularly enjoy is the opportunity to talk with like-minded horsewomen. As I said to Kristen, I think it is because a lot of the tough-as-nails, up-for-anything trail-riding gals I meet are not only aware of how deep the relationship between rider and horse can be, but are also, without being floofy-foofy about it, able to enunciate aspects of that connection in a way that most of the men I meet tend to shy away from.

And so, as one does under the stars by the flickering light of a fire, we talked about horses in general and horses in particular, dogs loved and dogs lost, trails ridden and places still to be explored, rascals and mentors, broken bones and backwoods adventures. And prairie chickens.

The next morning, Kristen and Sandra headed off hiking down a woodland path to look for a forest spring, and I packed up my crew and hit the road towards Regina.

Camp Notes for Horsey Folk

I’ve written about camping at Spruce Woods in this post from September 2018 and this long post from July of the same year (scroll down to “Spruce Woods” and “Camping Notes for Horsey Folk”. The information is still accurate, other than the fact that firewood is no longer provided. The Barn campground’s water gets turned off somewhere around early October (say goodbye to flush toilets, potable water, and hot showers), but the camp itself remains open until the road becomes impassable.

The equestrian trail map can be confusing in that the colours shown on the map do not appear as markings or blazes anywhere on the trails themselves; the trails do have names, but none of these names appear on the equestrian map. Instead, they appear on the skidoo trail map, which can be found online or in the cabins that can be found here and there in the park. On the two maps below, the orange loop would be Swanson; the green loop would be Girling. Sigurdson does not appear on the equestrian map, but is the route along the river that Kristen had suggested, and which meets up with the gravel road leading to the Barn camp (not shown on the skidoo map). One of the park fellas I met advised that people do cross the Assiniboine on horseback when the river is low enough, to access the trails on the north side.

The dunes trail heads west (and probably east as well, from the looks of things) off the Park Road, just north of the Trans Canada Trail.

Riding the Spirit Sands – Spruce Woods, Sept 11-14, 2018

Driving through small-town Canada, particularly in the north, will present you with all manner of visual delights.

Somewhere on lonely Hwy 17 in Northern Ontario, there is a motel with quasi-religious murals painted on its walls, and a giant statue of an extremely sparkly horse out front. There is a “For Sale” sign on the horse. Also on Hwy 17, there is a little roadside hut whose signage proclaims they have for sale cinnamon buns, and live minnows. And there’s another business – maybe a hotel or a restaurant or a gas station, I can’t remember – which had a wondrous lawn art installation featuring Spiderman, the Flash, a bunch of dwarves, and an airplane. (The only other roadside art I’ve seen that gives it a serious run for its money for the Visual Incongruity Award was the display I drove past on my west-east drive, showcasing a T-Rex statue alongside a tipi.)

When you get to Glenboro, Manitoba at the intersection of Hwy 2 and Hwy 5, there is a giant statue of a camel next door to the gas station. It only begins to make sense when you discover that the camel (Sara) is a tribute to the Spirit Sands, Manitoba’s only desert, located in nearby Spruce Woods Provincial Park.

Sara the camel in Glenboro.

 

On our way to Spruce Woods from Thunder Bay, we overnighted at Wabigoon, where “our” spot was waiting for us, and where yet another dreadful sunset was inflicted upon us.

The loons were calling that night, and again as the sun rose pink in the morning. Lovely 84-year-old Velma wasn’t there that day, but I did get to re-photograph her bike, the one she’s had since she was 15 years old.

 

Just as the landscape of Cypress Hills is not what you might expect when you think “Saskatchewan” – because admit it, if you’re not from Saskatchewan, your image of Saskatchewan probably consists of one long flat line drawn horizontally across a chalkboard – the geography of Spruce Woods is not what one would typically envision when you think “Manitoba”. Or at least not what I envision.

The park, up on a prairie plateau, features an undulating landscape of sand dunes covered in prairie grass, with copses of aspen, oak, and spruce. Down below, the Assiniboine River snakes its way along the northern boundary of the park.

We arrived at Spruce Woods in the late afternoon, on what would be the only hot sunny day of our stay. There were two other camping groups there: a local lady named Janie, and a group of vet technicians from the Winnipeg area. This Tuesday solitude didn’t even begin to hint at how busy the place had been on the weekend – Janie told me she’d arrived at 4 pm on the Sunday afternoon, and had to stand her rig in the laneway until 7 pm before she could pull into a vacant site.

Our three nights’ stay at Spruce Woods allowed us two riding days. On our first day, we rode out to the Hogsback, a water-cut sandy ridge that juts out towards the river.

View over the Hogsback.

 

The Assiniboine River.

 

After a lunch with a gorgeous view over the Assiniboine, we wound our way home on a challenging single-track trail across the top of grass-topped dunes for a five-and-a-half hour total ride time and a distance of somewhere between 25 and 30 km.

 

Spirit Sands.

It’s a desert!

Riding the dunes.

 

Our second day’s ride took us past gorgeous viewpoints and down to the river.

The Assiniboine at the second equestrian camp, “Canoe Camp”.

 

Although the trees were not yet in full change, the yellow and red and orange of the leaves against the white trunks of the aspens and the green of the spruce made for some very pretty riding, despite the grey, chilly weather.

 

As a native Ontarian, I thought we had a pretty good claim on thunderstorm wows, but prairie storms make eastern storms look tame. The one that hit on my second night at Spruce Woods didn’t so much blow in as gradually take charge over the night. For a couple of hours, while the air was still and the only sound was the chirping of frogs, the distant sky flickered like a faulty fluorescent light, more light than dark. Finally, the thunder began to roll and giant raindrops began to splash down, and then it was truly storming.

Although misadventures make for the best stories, sometimes it’s nice when nothing goes awry. My stay at Spruce Woods was altogether peaceful, and it would be lovely to come back some day.

 

Camping Notes for Horsey Folk:

I described the luxurious equestrian camp at Spruce Woods in this post from July (scroll down to “Spruce Woods”, and also to “Camping Notes for Horsey Folk”).

On this trip, I stayed once again at the Barn Campground at Kiche Manitou, but I also rode over to the second equestrian site, the Canoe Campground, which is considerably more rustic. There are pens, picnic tables, and firepits; while there is no potable water, there is a hand pump for horse water. There are pit toilets, and some very thoughtfully implemented shower stalls from which you can hang your solar shower.

The main trails at Spruce Woods are double-wide, mown trails, either sandy or grassy – it’s hard to find a rock in that place.  Trails are moderately well-marked, although not all trails you come across appear on the map, and some signs feature trail names that do not appear on the map. There are a few un-mapped single-track trails that wind across the dunes. There’s over 50 km of mapped trail, but you can ride over the grass, and there are skidoo trails and the above-mentioned single track trails that provide considerably more area to ride.  There are outhouses/picnic tables/cabins here and there at some of the major sights and intersections.

 

Barn Camp at Kiche Manitou