Bicycle Alaska 2008: Instalment 6 (new)

BICYCLE ALASKA, 2008

by John Berry

Installment 6: Saskatoon, SK to Winnipeg, MB:

July 24th (Thursday) (cont.): Saskatoon to Colonsay, SK. 53 miles.

After Doug and Janelle Gilmour left me I rode on with fair winds. Near Clavet I saw a freight train so long that I counted the cars – there were 125 of them! If the wagons are about 50 feet long (http://www.sdrm.org/roster/freight/hopp7801/index.html), the train was about 1¼ miles long. I saw several more trains of this length on the way to Winnipeg, and a couple that were much longer – probably about 2 miles long, I was told. Mostly they were unit trains of potash or coal, but some were of mixed freight.

As I passed through Elstow I could see the head frame and dump of a potash mine located at Allan, about 6 miles south of the highway. This was the first of four huge potash mines that I passed.

The Allan Mine (http://www.potashcorp.com/about_potashcorp/operations_map/allan/) is about 1,000 m (3,400 ft) deep, and produces 1.9 million tons of KCl (sylvite) each year. There are three sylvite intervals, separated by beds of common salt (NaCl). The highest grade interval of potash is about 11 feet thick, and the workings at Allan underlie a 10 km-square area. The potash is in thin laminae separated by slightly thinner layers of mud. Once brought to the surface the ore is crushed to liberate the crystals of KCl, and scrubbed to remove the clay. It is then fed to a series of flotation cells, where the pure sylvite floats to the top and is skimmed off, leaving behind a salt brine. Thus the large dumps on surface are composed mainly of salt, with some mud. The crude sylvite is dried, screened and graded, and then loaded into rail cars and shipped off across Canada and around the world. Potash was first found in Saskatchewan in 1942 during oil drilling. There are now around 10 mines in the province, which produces a third of the world's commercial potash. Canada is the largest miner and exporter of potash in the world.

Recoverable reserves in Saskatchewan are well over 100 billion tons, and 95% of the production is used for fertilizer, with the rest being used in the chemical industry. Right now the industry is in the middle of a tremendous boom, which is good thing for Saskatchewan, but perhaps provides a hint of long-term difficulties in feeding the world, as it means that more and more land is being farmed by modern mechanical methods using mineral fertilizers, a trend that obviously has limits.

The potash was deposited by repeated evaporation of the Elk Point Sea in mid-Devonian time (370-380 million years ago). One of the peculiarities of deposits of evaporite bitterns is that the dominant potassium mineral is usually sylvite (or sylvinite (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3672/is_199605/ai_n8744898/pg_3?tag=artBody;col1), a term for a mixture of sylvite and halite). However, if seawater is evaporated, the dominant potash mineral obtained is not sylvite, but carnallite, along with kainite. Someone somewhere calculated that, in the case of the famous Triassic-aged Stassfurt deposits in Germany, the observed mineralogy can only be obtained by the passage through each cubic meter of rock of ten cubic meters of water. This water then, over some part of geologic time, dissolved the original minerals and replaced them with sylvite. This is a very strange concept to many geologists, who are accustomed to thinking of evaporite deposits as the most perfectly impermeable rocks in nature.

At about 7 p.m. I reached Colonsay, where I found there was no hotel, but a very nice swimming pool and large campground with a lake. I had the usual dinner of hamburger and French fries at the Colonsay restaurant, and then went for a swim. I found that my swimming muscles had atrophied and I felt very uncoordinated in the water. I then pitched my tent at the far end of the campground, under the canopy of a tree which I hoped would prevent a heavy dew from forming on my fly-sheet. The tree abutted a well-tended vegetable garden belonging to Bob Procyshyn, who came out and not only showed me everything he had growing, from potatoes to peas and beans, peppers, tomatoes and dill, but offered me some of each. Having eaten, and knowing how most of these things would fare in my panniers during the heat of the day, I accepted only a couple of peppers.

July 25th (Friday): Colonsay to Foam Lake, SK. 113 miles

The day began with a snack of fresh pepper from the Procyshyns' garden and Saskatoon berries from the Gilmours'. All of my care to avoid a heavy dew on the fly-sheet, though, was of no avail, and to make things worse, there had been some rather dirty birds in the trees overnight, so I spent some time cleaning the results off the flysheet. Bob came out to say good-bye and to offer me more of the fruit of his garden, and gave me his card. I have good memories of Colonsay.

I had been debating with myself for days whether to take a rest day at the Manitou Springs Resort and Spa near Watrous: on the one hand I badly needed a rest day, but one the other, the spa was 50 miles off the road, and would cost me an additional day, or perhaps more, of riding to visit. I had gone as far as to make enquiries of people at the bike shop in Saskatoon and in the restaurant in Colonsay as to whether there was an alternative to riding out by the same road as you ride in, and had found that there "probably" was – it was not certain whether it was tarred.

At the turn-off to Watrous there was that rare thing in Canada, a road-house in the middle of nowhere, Blue Horizons, where I had a good breakfast and decided not to go to Watrous and Manitou Beach: pictures I had seen of the warm water pool at the Manitou Springs Resort and Spa showed black water, and people I talked to said that everything was stained brown from the iron in the water. I discovered that the room rates were well over $100 per night, although everyone said the campground nearby was very nice, but it didn't seem worth two to two and a half days of my time. I had and still have some regrets!

Little Manitou Lake is a highly saline lake with a water density of 1.06, claimed to be greater than that of the Dead Sea. The lake brine is dominantly sodium chloride, but with a great deal of magnesium and potassium sulphate (http://watrous-sask.com/history2.htm ). The literature claims that it fills a glacially eroded channel and that the brine is formed by evaporation, because the lake has no outlet. Personally, I doubt that it is either solely a glacial depression or formed solely by evaporation – I saw several lakes in the area that filled steep-sided depressions which looked to me like they were due to collapse as a result of dissolution of some of the underlying salt. The high potassium content of the lake water also suggests to me that there is some component due to inflow of dissolved salts from beneath.

The next little town was called Viscount, and the one after that Plunkett. According to the web site http://www.saskbiz.ca/communityprofiles/CommunityProfile.Asp?CommunityID=719, both towns are named after Viscount Plunkett, an Irish lawyer and judge who was also a major shareholder of the Canadian Pacific Railway. At Viscount there was a plaque commemorating the 100th Anniversary, on June 29th, 2008, of Brithdir United Church, which was attended by the Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan and the head of the United Church in Saskatchewan. I asked a man who was mowing the lawn nearby if this was a Welsh church, but he didn't even know where it was, and told me that the townspeople were mainly French and Ukrainian in origin. It turns out that the community of Brithdir has long since gone, and the origin of the name has been forgotten, except that it is undoubtedly Welsh. All that is left is the little church, hidden away in the countryside north of Viscount (http://mkanhai.livejournal.com/).

There are several Brithdirs in Wales, though, one of which is a thriving sustainable farming commune on the coast near Fishguard (http://www.brithdirmawr.co.uk/): I wish I had known about it when I was cycling and walking around there a year ago! Another is in Gwynedd near Dolgellau, and has a small Roman fort (http://www.roman-britain.org/places/brithdir.htm).

Near Lanigan I saw my first bright blue field of flax, grown here for the oil rather than for the fiber. By this time I had been cycling across the Canadian prairies for more than ten days, and the old saying that the prairies consisted of nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles popped into my head. As I had found when crossing eastern Colorado, Kansas and Missouri on my little motorcycle in 1961, this is just not true if one is on two wheels and not zipping along at the speed limit. In reality the prairie is miles and miles of yellow and green and blue fields, dotted with pretty little towns, and with vistas across low, rolling hills and wide valleys. Every few miles there is a grain elevator, almost every one of a different vintage and design. The roadsides are lined with blue and purple, white and yellow weeds, the latter with a strong and very sweet smell. In many sections there are dozens of little ponds, most with fleets of little ducklings fleeing the strange intruder on two wheels. Sometimes the mother is equally panicked, but on other occasions she can be blasé and just let the little ones go. And everywhere there are red, white and yellow butterflies, horse flies and white-footed flies, the latter with a bite that doesn't heal quickly. In British Columbia and Alberta there are crosses of all varieties and condition commemorating those who have died in accidents: these are scarce in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and the Northern states of the USA. Then there is the roadkill, which changes with the climate – on this day I saw my first dead skunk, near the little town of Elfros. And the litter: along the Alaska Highway the main component of this seemed to be full pampers, presumably dropped right where the baby was changed. These became less common southwards, as soft drinks cups and bottles became more common. Also, from about 58 degrees North onward there are little piles of scat every couple of hundred yards along the roadside, always about a foot onto the tarmac. I never did find out which animal was so fastidious as to drop its spoor so consistently. Every once in a while one would hear a shrill cry, as of a baby being tortured, and see a hawk take off from the telegraph pole, usually closely pursued by (or accompanied by) a small black bird.

So, in the microcosm the prairies are not boring at all, but of an infinite variety of natural and human detail.

East of Lanigan the road descended a gentle escarpment into an area that obviously flooded frequently, and was therefore used for ranching rather than crops. Everywhere there were muddy wallows. My guess is that this low area represents the outcrop belt of the evaporite sequence that is mined for potash. Here the Yellowhead Highway turns south and briefly joins highway 6 to Regina.

At Dafoe the two highways diverge again and the Yellowhead resumes its easterly course. It was very hot and I stopped at the large roadhouse at Dafoe for lunch and to rehydrate. I talked to a very nice couple from Regina who were taking their nine-year-old grandson out to see the original homestead settled by their grandparents. From here eastward the road passed along the southern edge of the Quill Lakes, broad shallow lakes that are an international sanctuary for migrating birds. At the little village of Kandahar a farmhouse was flying an Australian flag, but I didn't stop to ask why.

At Foam Lake I stopped and found dinner and lodging at the Big Willies Bar and Hotel. A small group of people in the bar here were listening to loud music and watching the antics of a very drunk young man nicknamed "twister", because in his inebriated state he would wobble and twist. The hotel had recently been renovated by the owner himself, and the result was a very nice bedroom with a rather palatial bathroom just across the hall.

July 26th (Saturday): Foam Lake to Churchbridge, SK. 95 miles

Another hot and dry day, with a gentle breeze from the SW that was not much hindrance, but no help, either. Dead skunks now became common along the road, as did rolling fields of blue flax, especially near Theodore, which was one of the first towns in Saskatchewan to have a Swedish Evangelical Mission Covenant church, a little before 1904. As in much of the Canadian Prairie, many of the fields in this area are quite small and of irregular shape, with large hedgerows between them, so that the country looks rather like the East Anglia of my youth.

The Yellowhead Highway follows one of the main railway lines across Canada, and so all through the prairies there are little towns about 12 km (8 miles) apart along it. These always have a grain elevator, and are usually just off the road. They nearly always have a hotel and a restaurant, as well as a grocery store and post office, and often have a municipal campsite with very reasonable fees. It is rather ironic that, whereas such little towns in the USA are dying or already dead, these tiny Canadian towns survive with some vitality. The irony arises because the law under which the land was homesteaded required people to live on their farms for at least 6 months a year for at least the first three years.

People would choose their land either on the basis of what prior immigrants told them or with the help of the local Crown Agent. In the case of the Ukrainians, who seem to have been the dominant group in this area, they would usually look for land that had had some stands of trees and some rocks available, as well as a good thick chernozem soil. The stone and trees they needed for building and for fuel (information from exhibition in Saskatoon Ukrainian Museum). Homesteaders had to pay little or nothing up front, but they were required to improve a certain number of acres each year for three years and to raise crops on those acres. They also had to build a house and live in it, without being absent for more than 6 moths in any year, which must have been a hardship for the Ukrainians, who were used to living in centralized villages in the old country. If, after three years, they could prove that they had fulfilled all the requirements of the law, they could apply for a patent to the land (An Official Handbook of Information relating to the Dominion of Canada, 1897, p.77). The patent document often became a family's most prized possession.

Canada did not try to become a melting pot of all the different ethnicities who came: there was for a long time an effort to provide schooling and other services in their own languages, and there was even in Saskatchewan a college for training Ukrainian teachers. There is still a bilingual Ukrainian catholic school in Saskatoon – the Bishop Filevich School (http://www.spiritsd.ca/ukrainian/eng_home.htm)

Fig. 1: Ukrainian Church, Insinger.

At Insinger, a tiny community, I took a photograph of a little gem of a Ukrainian Church, unpainted but in immaculate condition. Less than a mile away across a field was a much larger and more ornate church with a silver-painted onion dome. I took shelter from the heat and blazing sun by eating lunch at the Chinese restaurant in the little town of Springside. The next town was Yorkton, a large regional center. The tall silver dome of St. Mary's Ukrainian Catholic Church can be seen from miles away. Attached to the church is a Redemptionist Seminary. Exactly a month after I visited, the retired exarch for the Ukrainian Catholics in Great Britain, Bishop Michael Kuchmiak, died in Saskatoon and his funeral liturgy was held in this church. He had had a long career in Canada, the USA and Britain.

Fig. 2: St. Mary's Ukrainian Catholic Church and Redemptionist Seminary, Yorkton, SK

Outside the Information Center in Yorkton there was a series of demonstration plots for all the crops that are grown in the area. I found this fascinating, and spent enough time there to try to memorize what each crop looked like and what it was used for. I also left a sample of the different roadside flowers that I had collected with the young lady there, with a note to the agronomist in charge of the plots asking him to identify them for me. I have not as yet heard back! At Rokeby I saw the first road-killed snake of this trip. It was a harmless garter snake, but was evidence of my southward progress. The little town of Saltcoats, 15 miles east of Yorkton, struck me as idyllic in the evening light, although the photograph (Fig. 3) does not do justice to the exquisite green of the wetland between the Yellowhead Highway and the town.

Fig. 3: The main street of Saltcoats, SK, seen from the Yellowhead Highway

I had hoped to reach the town of Langenburg on the Manitoba border, but settled for the larger city of Churchbridge, 10 miles further west. There was a large and very nice, but almost empty, campground at Churchbridge, and here I spent a pleasant night.

July 27th (Sunday): Churchbridge, SK, to Shoal Lake, MB. 55 miles

Ever since leaving Whitehorse I had been trying to contact my friend Stan Korowski in Winnipeg. This had proven difficult because I turn my cell phone off while riding, for safety reasons and to conserve the battery, and anyway it was useless much of the time in the Yukon and BC.

I am not joking when I mention safety reasons for having the phone turned off: Ingrid once called me at the exact moment that I passed a garbage truck on 45th Street in Austin. The street here is very narrow and very busy, and the garbage truck had just emptied one bin and was about to pull out into the street to go to the next one. A cyclist in Austin has recently been killed by a garbage truck in a similar situation.

I did not have Stan's cell phone number, and would leave messages on his home phone, but he, apparently, was not in the habit of checking them often. This is understandable, because Stan and Irene have two teenage children. However, Stan had left a message on my phone asking me to contact two old friends of his when I reached Russell, his birthplace and the first town I would encounter in Manitoba. I had called Al Wagner, who had been on the high school track and field team with Stan, and he had told me that the service at Grace Lutheran Church would be at 10.30 a.m. Since it is 47 km (29 miles) from Churchbridge to Russell, and Russell is in the Central Time Zone, an hour ahead of Saskatchewan: this would mean getting up while it was still dark, at 5.30 a.m., in order to strike camp, eat a light breakfast, and be in Russell in time for the service.

However, the wind had turned decidedly against me during the night, and I had to peddle hard to maintain 10 miles per hour. The terrain also became somewhat hilly near the Manitoba border. At Marchwell, the last community in Saskatchewan and another early settlement of Swedish Evangelicals (http://www.multiculturalcanada.ca/Encyclopedia/A-Z/s13/5), there was a very pleasant smell in the air– very sweet and, I thought, probably coming from a malting. It turned out to be from the Bunge canola processing plant at Harrowby, just across the Manitoba border.

Soon after passing that border the road abruptly descended several hundred feet to cross the entrenched, southward flowing, Assiniboine River. On the other side of the bridge there was, of course, a long steep climb requiring the granny gear, which would slow me down to 3.4 m.p.h. From that moment on, I knew I was going to be late to church! However, I pressed on as fast as I could, and was soon at the Information Center in Russell, which fortunately was staffed. The very young lady there was not quite sure which church was Grace Lutheran, and called her mother to find out, but within a few minutes I was on my way, and was in church by the end of the first hymn.

The service was modern in style, but the congregation was small and mature in years. However, there were two small black boys running around, and they turned out to be the pastor's brand-new adopted children, brothers from Ethiopia. The family had got back from Ethiopia with them two weeks earlier, and already the boys were learning English, though they still spoke to each other in Amharic.

A couple, Coreen and Don Porter, from the congregation invited me for lunch at the Chicken Chef Restaurant on the Russell by-Pass. They lived in Foxwarren, the next town down the road. After eating lunch I went in search of Stan's friend Al Wagner, who lived "next to the C-Store", which turned out to be not quite as easy as it sounded. The C-Store is a chain of convenience stores, but it faced the by-pass, whereas Al lived on the residential street behind it. Al had been on the high school track team with Stan, and he drove me all around Russell to the scenes of both their boyhoods: Stan's family home, the schools, and the main street. There we tried to look up Ted Jankovsky at the Assissippi Inn: Stan had also given me his name, but he was not at home.

Russell's Main Street is framed by eight sets of wooden arches (Fig. 4). These are 32-ply nailed laminate arches made by a former Russell business, the Glu-Rite Rafters Company. They

Fig. 4: View along Main St., Russell, MB. The wooden arches were manufactured in Russell and were rescued and brought back to Russell when the stadium in Dauphin was demolished (Photo from http://www.russellmb.com/arches.html)

were used to support the roof of the stadium in Dauphin, and brought back to Russell when the stadium was torn down. They give Russell's downtown a unique charm.

Al has been widowed for a year or two, and has changed very little in his house. He plays a mean guitar and has a good singing voice, and has played for parties and in bands around the Russell area most of his life. Back at his house he played a couple of songs from the 1950s on the guitar, and we both sang along. It felt a bit odd doing this at 2.00 pm on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Al offered me some fruit and a glass of whiskey and water, probably the first whiskey I had had in 20 years, and after some conversation about running and "the good old days" we bid our farewells.

I had been warned about the dangerous roads of Manitoba, and while I was in the Yukon two members of a family of four had been killed while cycling eastward on the Trans-Canada Highway near Winnipeg. However, the road from Harrowby to Russell had been well-engineered, with wide shoulders, and so was the road southward out of Russell - a very pleasant surprise indeed. But 19 km (12 mi) south of Russell there was a sharp bend to the east and a steep hill down to the municipal campground and swimming pool at Binscarth, and right there at the worst possible place the road narrowed and the paved shoulder disappeared. I continued riding gingerly toward Foxwarren. I tried riding at the side of the road, and large vehicles tried to pass each other abreast of me. I tried riding in the middle of my lane, and a thirty-wheeler tried to come around me from behind with a car not more than 50 yards away coming towards us: others just put their finger on the horn button. I tried jumping off onto the loose gravel shoulder when I saw a vehicle behind me in my helmet mirror at the same time as there was an oncoming vehicle, but that was not fool-proof, as it is not always easy to see vehicles in time in a helmet mirror, especially if one wears glasses. One's eyeglasses need to be pushed right up to the top of one's nose, or the reflection in the mirror is badly out of focus. On a rough road glasses do not stay pushed up all of the time.

To make matters worse, it was now getting rather late, so the sun was low in the west, and at Foxwarren the road turned due east, so drivers coming toward me would be straining to see what was coming toward them. The volume of traffic was not urban, but it was busy by rural Canadian standards, and much of it was very heavy vehicles. After jumping onto the lose gravel at the side of the road for about the 6th time I decided I would never get anywhere like this, and put my thumb out. That didn't work well, so I started riding again, but soon had to jump back into the dirt. Finally, a pickup turned onto the highway from a side road very close to me. The driver stopped, and I asked if he could give me a ride to where the shoulder began again. He told me that that would be at Shoal Lake, about 30 km away. I asked if he was going that far, and he said "No." So I offered to pay him for the ride, and we lifted my bike into his truck bed.

Don Campbell was a fairly taciturn person of about 70 years of age, and he agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to take the $20 bill that I offered him. He was originally only going to Solsgirth, just a few kilometers from where he picked me up, so I was adding at least 50 km and nearly an hour to his drive, and at $1.25/litre ($5.00 per gallon), $20 didn't seem like an awful lot. During the drive we talked about the crops that were raised in the area.

Don dropped me off at a gas station on the Shoal Lake by-pass, which was undergoing major construction, and I rode through the deserted town to the campground (Fig. 5), stopping at Allen Choy's Chinese restaurant in the main street (Station Road) for a quick dinner.

Fig. 5: Lakeview Park Campground, Shoal Lake, MB. I pitched my tent just behind the first trees in the center of the photograph. (Photos 5 & 6 from: http://www.shoallake.ca/whattodo.htm)

The campground lay along the shore of a very pleasant lake and, as in most Canadian small towns, site selection and payment were on the self-service plan. You selected your site, and then wrote the number on the front of an envelope obtained from a "mail" box near the entrance, put the requisite fee inside the envelope, and stuffed the full envelope into a slot. I didn't have the change, but found a little Royal Canadian Mounted Police Museum at the end of the campground, and got change there (Fig.6).

Fig. 6: Log Cabin housing the RCMP Museum in Lakeview Park, Shoal Lake, MB.

Shoal Lake has been the administrative HQ of a Mountie detachment since the NWMP "march west" to Fort Edmonton in 1874. The original post was served as a local headquarters for "D" division, but was reduced to a mere mail stop in 1886, when the Manitoba Provincial Police assumed policing for the area. In 1921 Royal Canadian Mounted Police returned, and Shoal Lake is one of the longest serving Detachments in Canada. The young man staffing the tiny museum told me that it is a replica of the original NWMP building, and it is certainly stocked from floor to ceiling with interesting relics, including firearms and uniforms, as well as historical photographs and items of Native American culture. It is well worth a visit.

One of the east-west streets leading to the lakeshore in Shoal Lake is wider than all the others and is known as The Parade: it opens into a square at the lake shore, and although it is in a residential section like any other, I wonder if it is not the site of the old RCMP parade ground.

I had picked a tent site close to a large RV which had a party going on around a very cheerful campfire. I went over to chat and was made very welcome. Everybody was very curious about my trip. As I had found in several other places in Canada, these people parked their RV permanently in the campground, and spent most of the summer there. In this case they were natives of Shoal Lake who had moved away, and one family around the campfire were their childhood friends, who still lived year-round in Shoal Lake.

July 28th (Monday): Shoal Lake, MB, to Macdonald, MB. 110 miles

From Shoal Lake to Minnedosa I had a headwind and a shoulder to ride on. This shoulder began with a width of about 2 feet, but by the time I reached Strathclair it had shrunk to 18 inches and I could not fit completely within it. From Newdale to the Highway 10 junction near Minnedosa it was only 1 foot wide, but it was something and I felt relatively safe. I carried straight on into Minnedosa, which gave me several miles on old and bumpy, but empty and safe Highway 18A. After running straight across the plateau for 2.5 miles this highway swung to the right and into as cleft-like valley, and then down a steep hill into Minnedosa (Fig. 7), providing a beautiful view over the snug little town of 2500 people.

I found a nice vegetarian restaurant on Main Street, the Garden Thyme, and had an excellent meal. Sitting across the aisle from me were a couple, about my age, with strong English accents. They had farmed all their lives in Leicestershire, but had never been able to own a farm. So five years ago they had come to Canada and used their life savings to buy a farm near Brandon, a larger town 50 km south of where we sat.
Figure 7: View of Minnedosa looking North. I entered town through the cleft in the trees in the background.

It was a steep climb back out of Minnedosa, but then I had a strong tail wind all the way to Neepawa, another quaint old town. Neepawa is somewhat larger (3300 people) than Minnedosa, and claims to be the Lily Capital of the World, and also to be the most beautiful town in Manitoba, having won the annual competition more often than any other town. I had missed the annual 3-day long Lily Festival by a week! The Yellowhead Highway is Neepawa's Main Street, but the commercial district is a couple of blocks north, and I shopped at the Safeway store there. This was the first time that I have encountered a charge for grocery carts: you have to put a quarter in the slot to get one, but you get it back when you return the cart. I was a bit upset at first at having to pay, but it certainly cuts down on theft of the carts.

As I was approaching the traffic light at the Yellowhead Highway on Mountain Ave. a car drew up alongside me and the driver rolled down the window and asked if I was John Berry. This was Stan Korowski's friend and colleague Ozzie. He had a job in Neepawa that day and Stan had asked him to keep an eye open. Stan himself had looked for me in Minnedosa, but had missed me. I was beginning to feel among friends.

As you leave Neepawa you cross a deep valley – the first crossing of the Whitemud River, which the highway crosses and re-crosses from Neepawa to Westbourne. The wind had been backing, and from Neepawa eastward I had a crosswind, which became a headwind as the road veered to the south after Gladstone. The weather was very hot, and before Gladstone I stopped for a drink at a funky little store and restaurant run by an old French couple (Fig. 8). In the deep dark recesses of the store were every item of hardware and farmers' supplies that one could think of, many of them looking as if they had been sitting on the crowded shelves

Fig. 8: Quaint country store near Gladstone, MB. Inside was a restaurant and a general store with every item known to man, both run by a French-Canadian couple.

for a half century or more. As I left the store a young Black lady from Saskatoon pulled in on a big Harley-Davidson – she may be seen in the background in Fig. 8 bending over her bike. She was on the way to see some relatives in Winnipeg and in Ontario, and to see a bit of Canada at the same time.

I reached Gladstone, again on the Whitemud River, in the late afternoon but too early to stop, even though Stan had warned me in a phone conversation that here was the last accommodation for 50 km. I asked at the gas station and was told that there was a campground near Woodside. But now the wind was turning against me and my progress slowed. Nothing at Woodside but another crossing of the Whitemud River. Then a long slog to Westbourne. Just before the river crossing there was a sign pointing to a campsite of to the left, so I rode a mile down the road and across the railway line and ended up at a dead end in the yard of a deserted house. Back on the main road I crossed the Whitemud River yet again and came to a road junction called Sportsman's Corner. Here there was a small café run by Native Americans, but no-one seemed to be around. Eventually the cook turned up, and after an interminable wait I got a very basic hamburger (meat and bun only), and directions to a campsite, again on the left. After cycling through a tiny village I again appeared to be headed down a dirt road into the middle of nowhere, so stopped a car and got new directions, which were the exact opposite of those given at the store. By this time it was beginning to get dark, so I decided that my only chance was to try the next town, Macdonald. This turned out to be off the road to the left, and I could see the lights of the large town of Portage la Prairie not far away (perhaps 10 km), but it was too dark to get there along a road with no shoulder and heavy traffic.

After asking a couple of times I got directions to the park at Macdonald, and got my tent up just as the light fell. Pat and Hannah Blair, who live just across the road from the park, invited me into their house for a shower, which I needed badly after my 110 miles on a hot day. This couple had hearts of gold and insisted on giving me tea and ice-cream, as well as some pins extolling the virtues of Manitoba. By the time I got back to my tent the town of Macdonald was surrounded by a spectacular display of lightning, and as I crawled into my sleeping bag the first drops of rain fell. Within a few minutes I was in the midst of a violent downpour, with lightning so close that I decided it was easier to stay awake and watch it rather than try to go to sleep. After an hour or so the rain eased off, and then stopped: I went outside to watch the still-spectacular lightning for several minutes, and then slept like a log. Not a drop of water got into the tent.

July 29th (Tuesday): Macdonald, MB, to Winnipeg: 62 miles

I got an early start and was in Portage la Prairie by 8.30 am, in spite of having a strong headwind until I reached the junction of the Yellowhead Highway with the TransCanada Highway half way there. I also was held up just before the junction by the passage of a 151-car mixed freight train. People in Canada say that these huge trains are an innovation since the Canadian National Railway was bought out by US interests, but I have never seen trains quite so long in the USA.

I had breakfast at an A&W restaurant on the west side of Portage, and as I was leaving was greeted by a lady from whom I had asked for directions to the park in MacDonald last night. She was driving a Portage city-owned truck, and was very concerned to know that I had survived the storm well.

As I was rolling into the downtown area of Portage I was passed far too closely by a Gardewine North truck that turned into the Daily Graphic's offices in the next block to make a delivery. I followed the truck and spoke to the driver, who refused to accept that he had not left enough room between the side of his truck and my handlebars (he had left about ten inches), and who got very angry, defensive, and arrogant and claimed that he had tons of experience and that his judgment as a driver was the only guide to safety. I gave up arguing and went into the Daily Graphic office, where I got his company's phone number in Winnipeg and also directions to the RCMP, to whom I reported the incident in detail. I called the company when I got to Stan's house, but unfortunately did not reach the right person and did not receive a call back until I was on my way into the USA.

In the open country just east of Portage I passed four women walking along in the gravel shoulder, escorted by a support vehicle. They were walking to Ottawa as part of a campaign, the Walk4Justice, to bring national attention to the fates of 3000 women, mostly of First Nations origin, who have been murdered or who have disappeared in Canada in the last 40 years. The organizers feel that the Canadian police have not taken the murders of women, especially those of Native American women, as seriously as they should. The campaign was started by Gladys Radek, whose niece disappeared in 2005 on the Highway of Tears, BC Rte 16, on which 18 women have disappeared or been found murdered within the last 30 years,. This is the same Cassiar Highway that Julienne Pacheco had taken southward from Watson Lake. I walked along with two of the women, Tulsa and ___, and listened while they told me about their campaign and their feelings about the way violence against women is handled in Canada.

Barely half a mile after I had left the walkers behind Stan Korowski overtook me and got out to welcome me to Winnipeg, warn me of road conditions ahead and give me directions. One of his suggestions was to turn right off the TransCan in a couple of miles and take the much quieter old road through Oakville, and then to do the same at Elie, where there was a neat old country store at which to eat. These were welcome as there had been no hard shoulder on the TransCan from Portage, and traffic was dense and fast. It was also a dull and windy day, and the old, narrow roads were better sheltered from the wind. At Elie, where all the businesses had French names, the store was of Victorian vintage and sold excellent sandwiches.

As I waited in-line to order my sandwich I was inadvertently regaled with stories of the F5 tornado that had hit the town just 13 months earlier, on June 22, 2007 (Fig. 9). Several

Figure 9: The Elie tornado, June 22, 2007 (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/e3/Elie_F4_Tornado_Justin.jpg/240px-)
customers had very anxiously stayed awake and watchful through last night's storm because it reminded them so forcibly of the weather that preceded the tornado, and they were comparing notes. Even though this was only the second tornado to reach F5 on the Fujita scale since 1999, no-one was killed, and damage was surprisingly light: $1 million damage to the four mill, four homes and several cars destroyed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elie,_Manitoba_Tornado).

While I was sitting on the porch outside the store eating my sandwich a train passed on the line opposite every five minutes. These included two very fast (at least 90 mph) passenger trains, a west-bound one with 5 carriages, and an eastbound train with 15 carriages, including three dome cars and a final panorama car. I marveled at the efficiency of Canadian railways.
From Elie to Headingley I raced a storm, and at Headingley was intercepted by Stan and his friends all piled into one SUV on their way back to the office. Headingley is only a few kilometers outside the Winnipeg Perimeter Highway (Highway 101). With the strong and gusty wind now behind me, I was at Stan's house, just a mile inside the Perimeter Highway and a few hundred yards north of the Yellowhead Highway, by 1.30 p.m.

At first I thought no-one was home, but repeated loud calls brought forth a response from the upstairs bathroom, where Michael was getting ready to go to work. I unloaded the bike and set my tent, flysheet and sleeping back out to dry and air, and began to write up my journal. In spite of some threatening clouds and a still gusty wind the day had turned warm and sunny, and everything was soon dry. A neighbor, Mr. Houston, came over to talk and we exchanged cards and talked about budget traveling.

When Stan and Irene came home Irene prepared a lovely roast dinner, and set me up with a bed in the basement. I sat up late at night planning my way southward and writing up my journal on the computer.

July 30th (Wednesday): Winnipeg - 0 miles.

In the morning Stan and I ran errands. I took my sleeping bag to the local cleaners and laundered it in the oversize washer, and then I went to the barber shop. I left my change purse on a shelf near the dryers at the Laundromat. When I came to tip Leo, Stan's Ukrainian-Canadian barber, I fished in my pocket and realized it was gone. What was worse, I couldn't tip Leo. We went back to the Laundromat, and there was my purse, right where I had left it 2½ hours earlier– could this have happened back in a major US city? Anyway, the day was saved and Leon got his tip.

In the afternoon Stan drove me down to the center of Winnipeg and we walked around the Forks area, where the Assiniboine and Red rivers meet, the very heart of Winnipeg.
We climbed the observation tower at the Forks Market, an old warehouse complex that has been developed as a high end boutique shopping area. We also had a snack at a Korean restaurant in the complex, and went onto the point between the rivers, which has been landscaped and has a "walk through time" – a geological display as one walks up the ramp from the rivers edge – as well as an astronomically-based outdoor megasculpture. There is a marina and boat dock at the point, and one can take boat tours through downtown Winnipeg from there. Unfortunately, my camera battery chose the moment of our arrival at The Forks to die, and in such a tourist-oriented place there was no drugstore or camera shop at which to buy a new one, so I have no pictorial record.

After exploring The Forks we walked under the main railway line and across a major highway to the site of, and partially reconstructed ruins of, Upper Fort Garry.

This was a Hudson's Bay Company trading post established in 1822 and named after Nicholas Garry, deputy governor of the Hudson's Bay Company. It served as the centre of fur trade within the Red River Settlement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Garry).
"The Red River Colony (or Selkirk Settlement) was a colonization project set up by Thomas Douglas, 5th Earl of Selkirk in 1811 on 300,000 km² of land granted to him by the Hudson's Bay Company under what is referred to as the Selkirk Concession. The colony along the Red River of the North was never very successful, but changes during the development of Canada in the 1800s led to the colony forming the basis of what is today Manitoba.

Fig. 11: The Red River of the North watershed (shaded) & the route of Selkirk's Scots to Winnipeg (red)

Selkirk had become interested in the concept of settling the area after reading Alexander Mackenzie's 1801 book on his adventures in exploring what is today the west of Canada. At the time, social upheaval in Scotland due to the introduction of sheep farming and the ensuing brutal Highland and Lowland Clearances had left a number of Scots destitute. Selkirk was interested in giving them a chance at a better life in a new colony he called Assiniboia.

He then purchased a controlling interest in the Hudson's Bay Company and set up the land grant. His idea (apparently) was to gain firm control of the area in order to take control of the West from the company's bitter rivals, the Montreal-based North West Company. With a colony in place the Métis trappers supplying the North West's fur traders, the Nor'Westers, would be displaced, cutting them off from areas further west.

The land grant … covered portions of present day southern Manitoba, north-eastern North Dakota, north-western Minnesota, in addition to small parts of eastern Saskatchewan, north-western Ontario, and north-eastern South Dakota.

He sent out a small group of Scots in 1811 to the area, but they were forced to pause for the winter in York Factory. When they finally arrived in 1812 they built a fort, Fort Douglas, but by the time it was done the growing season was over and they hastily set about hunting buffalo for food.

When farming started the next spring, the results were less than expected and Selkirk had to ban anyone from taking food out of the colony. It is not clear if this was simply a way to ensure food for the colony, or a business move intended to cut off the Nor'Westers. Either way, the move touched off the Pemmican War. The Nor'Westers, who relied on pemmican supplied to them by local Métis, were so upset that they destroyed Fort Douglas and burned down all the buildings around it. The fort was later rebuilt and things settled down for a time.
Selkirk heard of the problems and sent out a new governor, Robert Semple, to take over. When he read a proclamation ordering the fighting to stop, the Battle of Seven Oaks broke out, Fort Douglas was destroyed for a second time, and the settlers were forced off their land. Selkirk then sent in a force of about 100 soldiers from the British Regiment de Meuron to enforce the peace and eventually become settlers themselves, while also capturing the North West outpost at Fort William, Ontario. This attempt worked, and peace was maintained. However it also left Selkirk almost bankrupt, and was one of the reasons the two companies were forced to merge in 1821, thus ending the problems for good (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_River_Settlement).

Unfortunately in 1826, a severe flood destroyed the original Fort Garry. It was rebuilt in 1835 by the HBC and named Upper Fort Garry to differentiate it from the "Lower Fort," or Lower Fort Garry, 32 km downriver, which had been established in 1831. Throughout the mid to late 1800s, Upper Fort Garry played a minor role in the actual trading of furs, but was central to the administration of the HBC and the surrounding settlement. The Council of Assiniboia, the administrative and judicial body of the Red River Settlement mainly run by HBC officials, met at Upper Fort Garry.

In 1869, the Hudson's Bay Company agreed to give up its monopoly in the North-West, including Upper Fort Garry. In late 1869 and early 1870, the fort was seized by Louis Riel and his Métis followers during the Red River Rebellion. After the Rebellion, the area around the fort continued to grow. In 1874, the city of Winnipeg was established and the name Fort Garry no was longer used. By the end of the 1880s, the majority of the fort had been demolished to straighten Main Street" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Garry).

A couple of blocks further west, and immediately south of the historic Fort Garry Hotel, which is in the style of the Park Plaza Hotel in New York (http://ghosts-hauntings.suite101.com/article.cfm/haunted_fort_garry_hotel) , is Fort Garry Place - a tall building with a revolving restaurant on the 30th floor. It was very difficult to find the elevator that went up to the Royal Crown Restaurant, but from this perch we were able to see all of Winnipeg – fortunately without any customers blocking the view, as the restaurant was not yet open for the evening.

We returned to The Forks by way of Union Station (now the VIA Rail Station). This impressive railway station, a joint effort of the Grand Trunk Pacific (GTPR) and Canadian Northern (CNoR) Railways, took three years to build and was opened in 1911. It was designed by New York architects Warren and Wetmore, designers of New York City’s Grand Central Station (built 1903-1913). (http://www.theforks.com/files/File/The%20Forks%20Walking%20Tour%202004.pdf).

The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway was a historical Canadian railway, and was constructed using loans provided by the Government of Canada. The company was formed in 1903 with a mandate to build west from Winnipeg, Manitoba to the Pacific coast at Prince Rupert, British Columbia. East of Winnipeg, the federal government would build the National Transcontinental Railway (NTR) across Northern Ontario and Quebec, crossing the St. Lawrence River at Quebec City and ending at Moncton, New Brunswick. The combined GTPR and NTR were to be operated as a single trans-continental railway, competing with the Canadian Northern and Canadian Pacific Railways (CPR). (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Trunk_Pacific_Railway). The Canadian Northern Railway was a private system that initially grew through the purchase and consolidation of a series of branch lines in the Prairies, but eventually became a national network and went bankrupt in the process, in 1918. The GTPR and CNoR together form the basis of the Canadian National Railway, formed through nationalization in 1923.

I found the station a confusing place, with ticket counters and waiting rooms apparently randomly scattered around, much as they are at Washington, DC's, Union Station. I stopped at the ticket counter to inquire about fares to Churchill, on Hudson Bay. My original plan for this trip had included a visit to Churchill to see the Hudson Bay Company facilities and the famous polar bears. I found that the fare from Winnipeg is quite expensive, but if one can get oneself to Le Pas, the last road connection to the line, it is considerably cheaper. Part of the station is a railway museum, but we did not spend time there.

After retrieving Stan's car from the parking lot we took a brief tour of the historic Exchange District of Winnipeg: this area contains many neo-classical buildings from the nineteenth century, and is undergoing a revival with new clubs, restaurants and coffee houses. It also contains several theatres and cinemas. Then we crossed the railroad tracks and turned west alongside them – here Stan showed me the offices of the company he works for, and also many old houses that we would call "shotgun houses" in Texas – i.e. single storey wooden houses with a narrow street frontage but running back from the street a considerable distance. This is a poor area that is just beginning to undergo gentrification.

Finally we visited the stopped at the Polo Park Mall to buy batteries for my camera. When we got home Irene fixed another wonderful meal for us – roast turkey!

I again spent the evening writing up my reports.

July 31st (Thursday): Winnipeg - 0 miles.

I spent most of the day in front of the computer writing and e-mailing my blog, although Stan and I did get out to the local pub briefly to meet some of his friends.
There we saw the first television reports of a grizzly murder that had taken place at about 8:30 pm the previous evening on a Greyhound Bus on the TransCan west of Portage la Prairie – perhaps only 3 miles west of where the Yellowhead Highway joined it. A Chinese Canadian who boarded the bus in western Manitoba had suddenly and repeatedly stabbed a young man who was sleeping on the back seat of the bus, with no provocation. The bus driver had pulled over to the side of the road, and the passengers had fled: they then prevented the attacker from leaving the bus by holding the door shut while the driver disabled the bus.

These events felt a little close to me since not only had I just traveled the highway, but I had on several occasions in the Yukon and Northern BC thought about taking the bus back home. These occasions were when I realized that I was falling behind schedule, and on days when there were strong headwinds and lots of rain. Not every day on a long bicycle trip is a pleasant outing, and not every crazy old man on a bike is always full of derring do! At the end of the Alaska Highway, in Dawson Creek, I had even inquired at the bus station about the fare and the rules for transporting bicycles. These turned out to be onerous and expensive – i.e. disassemble the bike and box it, and pay about $80, just like the airlines – so it seemed cheaper and easier to keep on riding.

All along the Alaska and Yellowhead highways I had been able to measure my progress by the times when the eastbound and westbound buses passed me. Each day the eastbound bus passed me about an hour and a half later than the day before, and the westbound bus about an hour earlier than the day before. Generally I would wave at the bus driver, under the assumption that most days it would be the same driver, at least until I passed through a large town: often the bus driver would give me a friendly toot back.

After the passengers left the bus and locked the attacker in it they saw him carry the severed head of his victim to the front of the bus and drop it: he apparently also ate some of the flesh of his victim. After the police arrived there was a stand-off for some hours, and then at 1:30 am the attacker tried to escape from the bus by breaking a window, and was arrested.