Manitoba Parks: From A(sessippi) to Z(ed Lake)

with Neil Babaluk

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The end of the journey

02/1/2011 1:08 PM

Earlier this month, Travel Manitoba introduced its 2011 marketing campaign with the slogan "It's Manitoba Time."

The slogan was met with harsh criticism from both marketing professionals and the public-at-large. The common thread of these complaints was that it didn’t connect with what Manitoba has to offer visitors.

When I heard the new slogan, it provoked a different reaction. I thought to myself, "It’s Manitoba Time: That pretty much sums up the last eight months of my life."

My Manitoba Parks: A(sessippi) to Z(ed Lake) project began on the May long weekend with the goal of visiting all 77 of the road-accessible provincial parks in Manitoba.

After a few years of travelling and living outside of Manitoba, I wanted to get to know my home province better and journeying to provincial parks in every corner of the province seemed like a great way to accomplish this. Every weekend was "Manitoba Time."

That first weekend trip, to the Turtle Mountain area, was just the beginning of an odyssey that wrapped up just prior to Christmas, with a visit to Asessippi Provincial Park.

In between, there were 23 additional weekend trips and over 14,300 kilometres put on my trustworthy Mazda 3.

My travel companions and I were able to visit the sandy beaches of Manitoba’s "Great Lakes," the cold, rushing rivers north of the 56th parallel, and the wooded hills of western Manitoba. For me, it was the ultimate Manitoba adventure.

While there were some trips that were rain-drenched and miserable (e.g. the Manipogo and Saint Lakes weekends), the positive experiences greatly outnumbered the negative ones. I was able to experience the vast and varied wilderness of Manitoba and see large swaths of the province for the first time.

Looking back, the high points of my travels were the three journeys to northern Manitoba. I had been to the Flin Flon area when I was younger, but over 15 years later this was just a distant memory.

Every kilometre of the journeys to the Lynn Lake, Flin Flon, and Paint Lake areas was a brand new experience. The weekends of fishing, canoeing, and hiking in three different are of Manitoba’s northern wilderness will be locked away in my memory for the rest of my life.

The trip to the Criddle/Vane Provincial Heritage Park stands out as well. Wandering through the empty rooms of the 100-year old house, beneath a full moon, was one of the most eerie moments I have experienced. While the ghosts of the Criddle and Vane families didn’t make an appearance, there was definitely a haunted feeling emanating from the cracked walls and scuffed floors of the massive farmhouse.

Beyond the parks themselves, the best part of the journey was the people that I met along the way. They lived up to Manitoba’s former slogan, and the one that is still on our license plates, "Friendly Manitoba."

There was the woman from The Pas, who we met on the rocky shore of Zed Lake, north of the isolated community of Lynn Lake. Every summer, she and her family would converge on Zed Lake Provincial Park, from all over Western Canada, for two weeks of fishing and camping. When we were forced off the lake by an electrical storm before we could get our fishing lines in the water, she was quick to offer us several packs of fresh walleye fillets.

Then there were the good Samaritans we met at a gas station in Grand Rapids. While my travel companions and I had been taking photos outside of town, one of our cameras was accidentally been left behind without any of us noticing. A couple found the camera on the side of the road and tracked us down at the nearest gas station. Instead of pocketing the camera, they went out of their way to find us and return it.

Beautiful landscapes and friendly people were the high points of a journey that took me all over my home province, a place that I never truly appreciated until these past eight months.

Manitoba’s provincial parks encompass many diverse landscapes, from rolling hills to tallgrass prairie to wild forests to lakes of all sizes and even a desert. I hope that my journeys and my writing about them have inspired readers to visit parks that they’ve never been to before.

Manitoba is a land of beauty that needs to be explored to be fully appreciated. As spring and summer of 2011 approach, plan to visit at least one of Manitoba's fabulous provincial parks. You won't regret it.

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Asessippi

01/3/2011 12:46 PM

This blog is titled Manitoba Parks: A(sessippi) to Z(ed) Lake. I travelled to Zed Lake early on in the journey, but after visits to 75 provincial parks I still had not been to the "A" park from the title, Asessippi Provincial Park. That all changed the weekend before Christmas, when my odyssey to visit all of Manitoba's road-accessible provincial parks came to an end with a trip to Asessippi.

Asessippi Provincial Park was one of Manitoba's first provincial parks, opening in 1964. Located just off Highway 83, between Roblin and Russell at the western edge of the province, the park surrounds Lake of the Prairies.

When the Shellmouth Dam was built on the Assiniboine River in 1972, the lake was created when the river backed up behind the dam. The southern end of the 67 kilometre-long lake is the focal point of the park, however the park also is home to wide, steep valleys that are remnants of ancient glacier-fed Assiniboine and Shell rivers. Today, the flow of these rivers is minute, but their legacy remains in the shape of the landscape.

The drive to Asessippi is long (381 kilometres from Winnipeg), but your efforts to get there will be rewarded in all seasons.

In the open water season, Lake of the Prairies is home to some of the best Walleye fishing in Manitoba. If fishing isn't your thing, the lake is also excellent for boating and swimming.

For hikers, there are excellent trails up and down the Assiniboine Valley, while history buffs can visit the remains of the Asessippi townsite. Built in 1882, the town was one of the first in this part of Manitoba. Unfortunately, the railway never made it to Asessippi and as a result it became a ghost town by the early 1890s.

Now that winter is here, ice fishing on Lake of the Prairies and snowmobiling are popular activities in the park. The main winter attraction of the area, however, lies 10 kilometres east of the park. When most Manitobans think of the name Asessippi, the first thing that comes to mind is the Asessippi Ski Area & Resort. Being an avid snowboarder, that's why I chose Asessippi Provincial Park as the last stop of my journey.

Opened in the late 1990s, Asessippi Ski Area & Resort is Manitoba's largest ski and snowboard hill, with three chairlifts and 25 runs in operation. Aside from being the largest, the resort offers the best skiing and snowboarding in Manitoba and has developed from a small to a full-service winter getaway destination, featuring ski and snowboard lessons, tubing, and a lodge with good food and a excellent apres-ski bar.

Driving up to the resort is strange because it literally appears out of nowhere. There is nothing but flat prairie as far as the eye can see. Then a small, pimple of a hill rises out of the prairie.

My travel companions, who had never visited the ski hill before, were questioning why we had bothered to drive all this way. As we drove through the resort gates, the road dropped down into a valley and the full extent of the resort came into view. It's not the Rocky Mountains, but by Manitoba standards it's excellent.

The resort charges $44 for a full-day lift ticket and between $28 and $32 dollars for rentals, depending on whether you would rather ski or snowboard.

Once on the slopes you never have to wait more than a couple of minutes to get on a lift and the snowpack this year is excellent. A series of beginner "green" runs and intermediate "blue" runs descend from the quad chairlift, located near the lodge. A small snowboard park, featuring rails, fun boxes, and small jumps, is also located off the quad chair.

Further away from the lodge, more difficult "black diamond" runs cut through the forest beneath the resort's two triple chairlifts. The resort's main snowboard park, which featured the beginnings of some massive table-top jumps, was still in the process of being constructed when we were out there.

Asessippi offers an excellent experience for skiers and snowboarders of all skill levels. Beginners and intermediates can hit the freshly groomed meandering "green" runs, while those with more skill can test the steeper runs like "Roller Coaster" and "Giant Panda."

We had a great day on the slopes. The temperature wasn't too cold and the snow quality was excellent. It was great to get out on the hill and bomb down the trails for the first time this year.

The trip to Asessippi Provincial Park concluded my Manitoba Parks: A to Z adventure. This journey was unforgettable and I now have a much better appreciation for the great diversity of landscapes of our province.

I'll be back in two weeks time, with my final post, wrapping up my eight-month Manitoban adventure.

Parks visited in today's post:

View A(sessippi) to Z(ed Lake) in a larger map

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Winter in the Whiteshell

12/16/2010 12:38 PM

Whiteshell Provincial Park

Whiteshell Provincial Park is one of Manitoba's largest and best known provincial parks. At roughly 2,800 square kilometres in area and stretching from the Winnipeg River in the north to Falcon Lake in the south, from the Ontario border in the east to Seven Sisters Falls in the west, the park is home to hundreds of lakes and thousands of cottages. It is a recreational playground in all seasons.

In the winter, snowmobilers can ride on an extensive network of trails that surround all of the major lakes in the park. Cross-country ski trails are found throughout the park, from Otter Falls in the north to Falcon Lake in the south. Maps of the snowmobile and cross country ski trails can be found at www.manitobaparks.com. West Hawk, Falcon, George, and Lyons lakes, among many others, are also hot spots for ice fishing.

After a 1.5-hour drive east of Winnipeg on the Trans-Canada Highway and just past the slumbering Falcon Lake Golf Course, we pulled into Falcon Lake. The townsite was quiet and with the lake just frozen over, the ice-fishing shacks were still sitting on the shore and what little snowmobiling was going on was confined to the land.

About 15 kilometres from the Falcon Lake townsite, on the south shore of the lake, is Falcon Trails Resort. The resort operates the Falcon Ridge Ski & Recreation Area. We were disappointed that they were not open when we were out there, but we were told they are expecting a December 18th opening day for the ski hill and cross-country trails.

The hill is one of the longest-operating ski facility in Manitoba, first opening in 1959. If you want some variety from the Winnipeg-area ski hills, you should check out Falcon Ridge.

Our next stop was West Hawk Lake, 15 kilometres northeast of Falcon Lake, on Provincial Highway 44. The lake, formed by a meteor strike, is Manitoba's deepest, at 115 metres. Because of its depth and massive volume of water, West Hawk is one of the last lakes in Manitoba to freeze over. It was a shock to drive up to the lake and see it still unfrozen, with a plumes of steam rising from the surface.

This hydrographic anomaly highlighted the fact that even though winter had hit the area like a bulldozer, the winter-activity season in the park was not quite ready to be kicked off.

Newly frozen lakes and streams meant that it wasn't safe yet to open the majority of the vast network of snowmobile and cross country skiing trails for which the park is renowned. Skiers and snowmobilers will have to be content with land-based trails until later in December, when the ice on the lakes is more solid.

With this knowledge in mind, my travel companion and I decided to take it easy and go for a cruise through the park by car. We decided to take a scenic drive to the Caddy lakes area after West Hawk Lake.

After a brief stop at West Hawk Lake, we continued down Highway 44 for three kilometres, until we reached Provincial Road 312. This road runs between Caddy and West Hawk lakes before ending at Ingolf, just outside the park and just inside Ontario.

The trip along this road provides some spectacular sights. Granite rock faces tower above the shoulders of the road and small lakes and streams break through the blanket of forest. About half-way down the road, the Whiteshell River empties into West Hawk Lake. The bridge over the river at this point provides a spectacular view.

We had a relaxing day touring Whiteshell Provincial Park. As the winter season further descends on us, I suggest you head out to the park and check out the many winter recreation options that the Whiteshell provides.

Next weekend, I'm heading out to the last provincial park on my list, Asessippi Provincial Park. I couldn't think of a better way to end my odyssey than with snowboarding at Manitoba's best ski/snowboard area.

Park visited in today's blog:

View A(sessippi) to Z(ed Lake) in a larger map

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