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Pamela O'Meara staff writer reprinted with permission from Lillie Suburban Newspapers Though they are wild and dangerous, the snorting bison milling around our car in Riding Mountain National Park seemed friendly enough as we spent about 45 minutes taking photos of mothers with calves, a big bull rolling on his back with feet in the air and another with an earring of weeds dangling down the side of his head. Riding Mountain, a large wooded plateau rising on farmland about three hours northwest of Winnipeg, Manitoba, is a vacation hot spot with hiking trails, campgrounds, boating, fishing, special events, wild animals and interesting small towns on the way. Manitoba is our neighbor to the north and Winnipeg is an easy eight-hour drive through rich farmland and northern forests, but sometimes we forget just what a pleasant place it is to visit - much like the U.S. but with a slightly different flavor. Our Riding Mountain tour began at 5 a.m. with a spectacular lightning display across the entire sky and then rain and wind. A few friends and I watched from our rooms at the Elkhorn Resort before heading out on a scenic drive through the park to look for moose, elk and deer. No luck; they must have bedded down during the rain. At a park shelter, Angela Spooner told us how she manages the 50-animal bison herd and then took us to a minty-fragrant mixed fescue prairie section of the park to tell us how to maintain that. She said the ground needs to be disturbed - by fire, vehicles or bison - to force open and spread plant seeds. Birds use bison hair to make their nests warmer for eggs and babies, she added. Overhead, loons were calling and the sky was full of billowy gray clouds. Along the edge where the prairie met the woods, a whitetail deer ran by. By 9:30 a.m., we had worked up an appetite and headed to a shelter at nearby Lake Audy for a delicious picnic catered by Sparrow artisan bakery and featuring local cheese, cinnamon rolls, croissants and blueberry-rhubarb jam. Behind the scenes In the park's wildlife lab, coordinator Ken Kingdon told us how the park controls bovine tuberculosis in deer and elk by getting blood samples and putting on monitors so the animals can be tracked down again later by helicopter if the tests prove positive. Out of 100 elk, 11 to 15 will test positive and be killed but only two will actually have the disease, he said. Later, sitting at an unexpected lovely English garden beside Clear Lake in the center of the park, Kingdon told us how finger-length slimy sculpin fish are monitored because they are temperature-sensitive and give an early-warning signal like a canary in a coal mine if something is amiss. He said Minnesota is also looking at changes in water temperature. The fear is that water won't be as cold in the future so there will be more algae growth. Along with the slimy sculpin, whitefish and trout will also be affected by changes in river and lake temperatures. We missed our sunset cruise on Clear Lake, due to rain but we stood by the water admiring a double rainbow over the sailboats and cottages and then as the sky cleared, watched the sunset in brilliant pinks and oranges over the lake. The Ukranians Part of the fun of this trip was stopping in small towns between Riding Mountain National Park and Winnipeg. In Dauphin, volunteers demonstrated bread baking in an outdoor wood-fired clay oven the way Ukrainian immigrants did it decades ago, explained Kay Slobodzian, a director of the Trembowla Cross of Freedom Historic Site and Museum. While the bread was baking, Slobodzian and several passionate volunteers served us a traditional Ukrainian meal of borscht, a lovely deep-red soup with beets and onions, along with beet leaves wrapped around pieces of bread topped with a cream and cheese sauce, handmade sausage and perogies in the adjacent old one-room schoolhouse. The historic Trembowla site commemorates the Ukrainian pioneers who arrived in the 1890s and includes a schoolhouse, St. Michael's Ukrainian Catholic Church and two pioneer homes. People of Ukrainian background come from all over Canada and Europe to visit. At the height of the Great Depression, the 29 Ukrainian families in Dauphin hand-built the magnificent Ukrainian Catholic Church of the Resurrection in the style of Eastern Byzantine architecture of Kiev - a cross with four domes. They brought in a famous iconographer to paint Bible scenes on the walls and ceilings so illiterate church members could follow the stories, explained our guide, Jan Sirske. The beautiful church has been designated a national and provincial historic site. Other small towns In the small town of Onanole, just outside Riding Mountain, Aditis Touch Greenhouse owner and chef Jason Kelly has turned part of his grandfather's homestead into an a large organic garden with herbs and flowers and farm artifacts. After walking around his gardens and seeing his artwork inside, we sat in a flower arbor to enjoy colorful salads of freshly picked leafy greens and flowers, purple carrots, heirloom tomatoes, berries and organic cheese topped with poached pickerel (walleye). Dessert included fig ice cream garnished with fresh berries. Poor Michael's Bookshop Art and Café also in Onanole offers a large selection of treasured old books and local and world gifts owners Murray Evans and Lei Anne Sharratt collect during their winter travels. Frequent concerts and book readings are also featured in the summer. The town of Neepawa is the home of one of Canada's most honored authors, Margaret Laurence. Her childhood home is open to visitors, as is the cemetery with a stone angel monument upon which her novel, "Stone Angel," is based. Our trip combined outdoor activities with history, ecology and good food in the small towns along the way to Riding Mountain, which itself offers hiking trails, campgrounds, beaches, boating, fishing, wild animals and special events for a summer vacation to our friendly northern neighbors in Manitoba. For more information, go to travelmanitoba.com | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
April 8, 2012
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