Windy Riding Mountain NP to Lanigan Sask

Away about 9 CDT, 14C and sunny. The rain must have been heavy overnight, this was the park entrance:

We’re heading to some interior park roads, particularly the bison viewing area.

This big lone bison bull: 

...had an encounter with a ranger while we and the birds watched from safety nearby:

The gutsy ranger ended up taking his coat off and flapping it at the bison, which made it back off. No trees out there! Below is a .wmv video clip of the encounter. Once you click the Play arrow, you can click the box in the lower right to view it full-screen:

We also spotted several pelicans on a nearby lake:

It got quite windy and stayed fairly cool, up to 17C at 10:30.

When we came out of the park on the same road we came in on (which was the only way out), a tree had fallen right across the road. We had to strip off branches then sneak under it to carry on:

Coming Through

Then not too much further on the same road:

This didn’t look too bad, but we couldn’t move it. Luckily we had our small axe with us, and were able to chop a section out and move that aside, with the help of a passerby. Lots of exercise this morning!

So by 12:30 we’d come about 80 km today, and breakfast had been a couple of fig newtons and some sugar snap peas. When we went to make lunch with some buns we had brought from home, we discovered they were still at home, hopefully still in the freezer (they were).


We pressed on into Dauphin, had lunch, got a few groceries and fuel. It’s up to 24C and quite windy.

We stopped about 6 pm CST (ie Sask time, since Saskatchewan doesn't switch to DST) at Lanigan Lions cg, about 139 km east of Saskatoon, $12 unserviced.

Route today: