Some time ago I was searching on the internet for some things to do in Saskatchewan when I came across THIS site, which had some pictures of places I had never heard of. A couple of those places were the Great Sand Hills which Amie and I visited last fall (CLICK HERE) and the the killdeer badlands which Doug and I visited last month (CLICK HERE). Even more striking, was this picture of these mysterious Diefenbaker Sandcastles. Our first stop was at Gardiner Dam when I thought I saw a whale in the lake but it was actually just massive ice buckling into huge piles due to the morning thaw (very similar to a previous adventure last year that we thought was an island stampede - CLICK HERE). From there we went to Beechy Saskatchewan to find there were no signs to the attraction. Our only piece of information was that they were south west of the city.

We started driving west and then cut south randomly on some grid roads. We just kept picking random south or west roads (some leading to dead ends or farms) until we very surprisingly found some old signs pointing to the sandcastle area. Finally we made to the end of the road with a no trespassing sign and parked the car. We decided we could probably never trace our steps again and it was pure luck that we stumbled upon the right road.

We whipped out the Coleman stove and cooked a nice breakfast of scrambled eggs and strawberry pancakes before embarking on foot to find if these sandcastles were really as glamorous as in the internet photograph. We walked around for over an hour before finding a sign, not for the sandcastles, but for this other attraction called Sunken Hill. We thought that it must have been the sandcastle area too and thought we saw something that looked like sandcastles in the distance, so we decided to head back pretty soon. Amie sat down for a bit while I took a final look around the area.

After walking along the cliffs a bit, I spotted another sign in the distance and that was it! When we finally found the sandcastle formation it was pretty exciting because they really did look amazing. There is a total contrast between them and the surrounding hills. The view was extraordinary with the dropoff cliffs and the Diefenbaker lake in the background. Very recommended hiking adventure!

And just when you thought no more could be done in a day, we drove to Outlook and Saskatoon to pick up wedding suits from the Koops and the Vincents, then dropped off some stuff for Amie's friend Crystal in Saskatoon, then hung out all evening with Katie and Paul Korchinski before driving back to Regina in the night!

-steve-

clockwise from upper left - Steve Gosselin, Matt Campbell, Dan Beutel, Mike Nagel, Graeme Cowie, Nelson Bultitude

Big smiles all around after a very successful 4th year project demonstration to the faculty of engineering professors.

US border marker

Doug and I decided we needed to take these two international students (Feng and Shawn) with us on an adventure this fine spring day. It turned out to be a really fun adventure with enough culture clash to keep it exciting. We got into the car early in the morning and Shawn asks "So how many people are in our tour group?" (Questions like this are very typical of Chinese tourists). We shocked him by telling him that there was no tour group, nor any tour bus. He then asked where we went to meet our guide. Again, he was shocked to know we were going on an unguided adventure. I guess venturing out somewhere unknown was something these two guys from China were not used to.

We got to the Killdeer badlands and hiked for about 5 hours. There were some great views (as seen on the pictures). The most notable thing that happened was during the middle of our journey when we were furthest from the car. Feng decided to slide down a hill and sprain his ankle. We thought he was done and we would have to leave him there but he surprised us by limping two hours back to the car. Each of the guys were delighted to find deer antlers as souveneirs. We also drove the guys to the US border so they could jump across the line to say they had "been there."

The best part for me happened at the end. We gathered a bunch of broken trees and put them in the trunk. We then drove to more familiar badlands (big muddies) to do some caving, climbing and most importantly, make a fire. Unfortunately we soon got really hungry. Then I realized that we had some sliced meat in the car that I was returning to doug. We preceded to roast the meat on sticks. We had so much doing this, that we didn't even realize it was snowing pretty hard. We drove away into the blowing snow having rid ourselves of adventure for a couple days.