Driving in tired and sore after a very long day, the town had a rosy glow to welcome us.
Gosh, this was a very different world from the one where we had started, back in Cranbrook BC. That one started in pre-morning greyness. When we drove out of town we passed a number of Canadian icons. First the arena. Every Canadian town of any decent size (ie. bigger than Eastend) has one. I mean an ice rink. But we don't call them ice rinks. We call them arenas. There was one of those in Cranbrook and then another Canadian iconic moment happened when we passed a Tim's just in time for a breakfast bagel. Tim's is also a Canadian icon but there were in short supply coming across the southern route of BC.
The day was looming very cold and grey. The mountains surrounding Cranbrook did not look the least bit friendly, in fact after we turned the corner.....
we ran into a very impressive wall of mountains.
Thankfully, at the very last moment a cleft between them appeared and the road whizzed
us onward and upwards to the Alberta border and Crow's Nest Pass.
The last photo above is of the Frank Slide, an event in 1903 in which tons of mountain side toppled
down on top of the town swallowing up and killing 90 souls out of a population of 660. You can read more about this momentous event here: http://www.history.alberta.ca/frankslide/slidefacts/slidefacts.aspx
As soon as we left the pass area, we droppd immediately down to Alberta prairie. I send you the following photos as an example of the dramatic change. First we saw fields of wheat and wind turbines...
It's amazing to think that this flat farmland extends for another 800 to 1,000 miles across the heartland of Canada. Driving an RV on it is a snap compared to the heights of the mountains. We cruised along as if we were at walking speed, and the speedometer said 110kph. "This is great!"we both exclaim. I think we both were weary of the heights and the twists and turns of the mountain roads, particularly with the fifth wheel attached to the back of us.
The next few hours brought us a prairie filled with new crops from the wheat fields of old. We saw huge mounds of sugar beets and acres and acres of potatoes.
There still are miles of wheat fields, in fact, after witnessing the sad dismantling of so many of the beautiful grain elevators in the past 20 years, it was heart-warming to see a very lovely one actually being renovated and brought back to life...
At last, as the day was waning rapidly and ourselves with it, we found the turn-off for Eastend and proceeded south through a very different landscape from the rest of the prairie. One might wonder, indeed exactly why a small town in the southWEST corner of Saskatchewan would call itself EASTend. Well, as usual there is a very logical reason. In the late 1880s the North West Mounted Police (now known as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police) established a post at Fort Walsh on the east end of the Cypress Hills. These hills are the highest point of land between the Lakehead district of Ontario and the Rocky Mountains. They are the remnants of the old continent, before the plate from the west rammed into it and crumpled everything up to make the Rocky Mountains. They are very old and worn remnants of these mighty ancient mountains. And because the outpost of the Mounties was on the east end of these hills, the settle that grew up there was known as Eastend.
The Cypress Hills are a welcome break. They are gentle and rolling, with stands of lodgepole pine (mistakenly taken by the pioneers as cypress), and aspen, and they are frequently crossed by coulees or valleys. We saw a farmhouse, snuggled nicely into one of these hills of the way to Eastend.
On this note, I will stop my tale. Today we visited with folks in Eastend itself, and re-connected to my family's past history and life here. But that is tomorrow's story, and we all must wait.
I'll be waiting. Almost feel as if I'm along for the ride.
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