The End of Manitoba

(As a side note, that top picture looks like we did some cut and paste, but that is a real panoramic view of the land around us on our hike! You can click on the pictures to make them bigger)
This is definitely the shortest amount of time we have had between our blog updates, but we are more aware of what northern Canada has to offer in terms of the internet, and we know that we will not have much communication in the next week or so.
When we left The Pas it was to go to Riding Mountain National Park, and we got there quite late. Really it was a relatively uneventful campground, but the one very exciting thing we saw was a female moose at the side of the road going through the park to the campground. This was Chris's first ever moose sighting, and Katie can't remember if she saw one at Killarney that one time that Mo did, or if she made that up in her mind. The other first we had in that park was deer breakfast sausage. It was so good!
The next day we went to Spruce Woods Provincial Park, which was recommended to us by the lady at the Manitoba Information Centre. The first thing we did was three huge loads of laundry, which was desperately needed. We didn't quite have enough change for the dryers, so our campsite was converted into a laundry drying station in the beautiful hot sun. For dinner we made the entire thing on the campfire ... we had huge potatoes, red and green peppers, tomatoes, and maple beans (Chris's all time favourite). It was so satisfying.
We decided to make it a two day stay, so that we could soak up the rare sun rays. We woke up that morning to the sounds of a huge pack of coyotes howling their hearts out somewhere nearby, apparently out on quite the hunt. We played an intense game of scrabble in the early afternoon heat, because the hike we wanted to do was going to be really hot and they recommended doing it closer to the evening. The hike was through Manitoba's only desert-like area -- it wasn't quite a desert because it got enough rainfall throughout the year, but it was four square kilometres of sand dunes (that used to be 6,500 square kilometres thousands of years ago!). The trail also went to a large ground-fed pond called the "Devil's Punchbowl", which was a swirling pool of blues, purples, and greens because of the water fed through the sand below. We hiked for about three and a half hours, and ended up doing about 9km. It looked like man-made terrain, because it would go from arid dunes to lush forest in no time, all depending on the elevation and the way the wind brought the rain through the area. It was stunning, and we even got to see Manitoba's only cactus. We thought it was pretty cool looking, but we didn't appreciate how rare it was until we came across a woman on our way back. When she saw us, she asked if we had seen the flower that grows out of it, and when we said we had she was so excited. She said that she had sat near it all morning waiting for it to flower and it never did, so she was on her second trip of the day to see the flower it produces. Pretty cool!
When we got back it was around 8, so we got dinner going. We had garlic deer sausage on a bun ... it was so much meatier and heartier than the sausages we are so used to buying in grocery stores. It was amazing! We could only finish half of the small one that Dwight gave us ... we still have the other half and an even bigger one to enjoy! For dessert we cooked up bananas in their skins filled with chocolate and pecans while we made plans for our journey through Saskatchewan, and had a raccoon visitor who apparently loved the smell of the dessert. That night we heard some very loud noises, which we can only assume were raccoons fighting nearby. We are definitely in the wild!