Prince Albert National Park

We stayed four nights at the Red Deer Campground of Prince Albert National Park, which is on Waskesui Lake in northern Saskatchewan.

As we are finding with many of the Canadian National Parks, a central area of the park has been developed as a resort to provide ordinary Canadians a recreational getaway. This is the main beach.

The Waskesui Townsite has many privately owned cottages. The park regulates the square footage and as this is highly desirable real estate places with under 900 square feet sell for around half a million, USD.

There’s a small commercial area…

and a beautiful golf course designed by Canada’s famous Stanley Thompson.

The clubhouse was built by relief workers in 1934 (similar to the CCC in the U.S.).

We never got a chance to play as they were holding a women’s tournament all week. Tee times were only available late in the day.

For all the development this is still a National Park with thousands of acres of forest around.

These young elk were checking out the grass in the campground.

They were pretty relaxed among all the campers.

We took a hike at the north end of Lake Waskesui along the short Kingsmere River.

These steps took us down to the river and bridge.

On the other side of the river was the rail cart portage.

A dock with rollers allows people to pull small boats up and onto carts.

We met these two with their boat coming back down the portage,

so we got to see the rail cart in action.

The rails went close to a half mile from the upper dock to the lower.

Not far from the end of the portage was Kingsmere Lake.

There are five or six campsites on the lake, but we just walked as far as the first one, Southend.

Another hike we took was to Height-of-Land Tower. This 45 foot tower gives a view over the vast forest here. This is the edge of the Boreal Forest where spruce fades into aspen and then to fescue prairie. The tower sits on the divide between the Churchill and Saskatchewan River systems.

We drove up the west side of Lake Waskesui to the Narrows, where the channel is only a hundred yards or so wide.

Nearby was the Treebeard Trail where some of the oldest trees in the park can be seen. The tallest trees in this harsh northern environment are no bigger than young Redwoods.

The aspen and paper birch do reach astonishing heights for their slender girth.

I was a bit dissatisfied with the Treebeard Trail, but later I hiked alone on the Boundary Bog Trail and far preferred that. It started with a wide path through black spruce with an understory of moss.

That led to a boardwalk through a bog…

to one of the many little lakes that dot this country. I learned that the depressions we had been seeing all over, some water filled and some not, are called kettles and they formed from ice chunks that broke off the retreating glaciers. Sediments built up around the ice and when the ice finally melted the resulting low area is a kettle.

There were acres of sphagnum here, and some was turning red. I wanted to identify these little berries, but haven’t been able to, yet. My Apple ID app thinks they’re bugs.

Altogether we enjoyed our stay in this not so wild north, though the mosquitoes here were voracious.