Camping at Grasslands National Park - Destination: Saskatchewan Part 3

Hi everyone, so in part three of our trip, Destination Saskatchewan, we are heading over to Grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan, crossing the Alberta and Saskatchewan border. It's our ultimate destination for this trip. Yeah, it's in a very remote isolated area, southern Saskatchewan, and prairies like they would have been hundreds of years ago, and we're looking forward to it. Yeah, so we hope you enjoy this video. need one. And what everyone needs when camping in Grasslands, a Pepsi. Good morning everyone. Yeah, we're at Grasslands, West Block. We came in from Dinosaur. It's a long drive. Yeah, it's a bit grueling actually because it's all the same landscape. Yeah, it's just sort of fields, ranch land, and literally, literally miles between houses. We got in last night and the sun was setting. I actually came out for a walk in the same area kilometer an hour gusts. Yeah, although our friends Steve and Darlene are on the east coast and they were batten down because they had 85 kilometer hour gusts. So we were, we were lucky. Right over there, and Mickey was looking at them as was I through the telescopes they have here. There, Mickey can see there's three bison sort of a 40 percent away across the valley. There's I think that's four that I can see. They get a general idea. I was sitting here having breakfast and suddenly I jumped because something was on my shoe and one of them had clambered onto my shoe. Cute little one, like a bit of a baby one. Beautiful here, but it's going to get hot. So we're going to go for a bit of a drive, tour some of the area, and it's just a little cooler driving in the van than it will be sitting here. Of course, we could run our air conditioner, but it's loud. It's not pleasant to spend a lot of time sitting into the little shed over there. There's a card reader inside and Gordon obviously needs to figure it out. You can pay with the credit card. I think basically you just have to punch in how much gas you want, punch in the pump number and then your credit card and you're good to go and Gordon's filling the tank now. I think a lot of the rural gas stations in Saskatchewan operate this way. Now we're going to head over to the east block to check it out because we have to kill time and during the hottest time of the day stay away from the campground. Someone always said if you're going to go to the Badlands, which is the east block, you want to go when it's the hottest day center in there. It's a lot smaller than the Frenchman Valley. You do get a nice valley view from here. Unfortunately we've still got a lot of haze or smoke. If there was, we'd get here and I'd probably do a hike and make it in a pinch. I'd rest in the van. Our air conditioning will run for an hour or so, maybe two hours I think here, but just off battery. But it's a little too hot to go for a hike. It's probably not a surprise. Always too hot for me. I'm just doing a walk through the campground. Here are the otentics, which I think are pretty cool. Those are probably washroom buildings there. Yeah, Mr. Finch is enjoying the coolest part in the van. Yeah, it's the floor. It's hot out. Our battery is right now around 13.05 volts. Typically when they're charged they're about 13.3 and somewhere in that range. Running the AC right now. In the past, just kind of guesstimating and running it for a while, we could get two, two and a half hours. Of course it depends how hot it is and if it has to run steady. Our batteries of course will not be as good as they were, but I suspect we could easily run for another hour without any concerns. 12.25 our batteries would shut off somewhere around there. Of course we could always start the engine to supplement the charging if we wanted to, but the one problem is it's loud. Listen. Still, it does make it more bearable in here, right Finch? We're lucky enough right now we've got the back of the van directly into the sun, which is good because we've got an insulating layer at the back door and then the sides are usually, I think, our weak point for heat. And our air conditioner actually just turned off, so it's managed to cool the van down reasonably. Geez, I have the wrong beard. So we're on the Badlands, what's it called? Badlands Parkway. Yeah, we're on the Badlands. Not named after me. So we're just gonna do a little ride up here. And I was complaining because we've had to drive on so much gravel, as you know, I don't like driving on gravel. And this section's paved. Yeah, for whatever reason. It's like going to Costco. Yeah. And there's some apparently some hiking trails and nice overlooks and everything. And it's a single lane road as you can tell, so you have to yield. There's so little traffic, it probably doesn't matter. valley just looked amazing. I can see, I'm not sure if that's the Valley of Ten Thousand Devils or something. What an amazing place to hike. I'd want to do it on a much cooler day than today. I think it'd be lovely to come back here and do that as a hike. Good morning. I am just out. It's about 5 30 in the morning. Sun was up, or at least it was light out. About 4 30. I took a shot outside the window of the van. And even now the sun's starting to peek through the clouds over there. I'm going to go out to a trail that way, which is kind of to the west. Beautiful. There must be more smoke than I realized. You can just tell by looking at the horizon. Plus I noticed when the sun is coming up it's quite orange. This trail's just over there, so I don't know, maybe a kilometer from the campground. So I cut through the viewpoint trail and then I'm on the road. Okay, this is the Broken Hills Trail, 11.2 kilometers here. There's a loop. You'll see I'm actually wearing pants today, which is rare for me in the nice summer months, but I'm trying to reduce the likelihood of ticks on a trail like this. Cow pies, or I guess probably bison pies. None that I can see. We were talking to some people yesterday who probably got within about 100 meters or 300 feet. They don't recommend getting any closer, which you can understand. In their case, the bison were kind of in their way, so they had to go around, which is a very smart thing to do. Here's the question. Do I go left or right at the intersection? Well, the arrow says go left, so it's usually the direction I choose anyway. If it all goes well, if I do the full trip, I'll come back that way. I'm going to do clockwise. We debated on staying a day at Rock Creek Campground. I do prefer this one, actually. There's something about the grasslands I like, but there's that wonderful hike through the Buttes that would be a wonderful trip to do, so give some thought to another trip here. My trail, you can see it's got markers, just goes up there and then comes down that way. the 5k marker roughly halfway through. It's taken me about an hour, which makes sense because my hiking speed on terrain like this is about five kilometers an hour. Beautiful. It's too bad it's smoky because you can see in the background those ridges. 6k, so more than halfway. Look at the view. As I crested this hill, I got back into cell phone reception area, which is quite good in a lot of places. Outside, coming up, nothing. But sadly, air quality warning in effect. I think I have to go up there. And I thought I saw a couple of those beautiful red National Park chairs up top from a viewpoint back there. They're going to make me work for it. It's amazing. There are all those beautiful grasslands. You go up on the other side of those ridges, generally flat, smooth, and boom, up here. There's the trail going down. Honestly, this is about the most fun I've had on a trail in a long time. I really enjoyed the grassland section a lot. I would have been just very happy had the rest of the trail just been like that. But now, with a little bit of a hill climb, even more enjoyable. It's just been impossible to cook outside. I actually had a piece of wood, a big heavy piece of wood, sitting on the stove so it didn't blow over. But it's actually lightened up a little. Today's the worst for smoke. It hasn't been too bad, actually, but you can see it's pretty hazy. So last night at Grasslands National Park, the setting sun is all orange because of the wildfire smoke. And it's windy out there, so we can't really spend too much time outside. So we're hunkering in in the van. So we hope you enjoyed our incredible visit to Grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan. We had some challenges with smoke. I think it'd be incredible if we'd had the sort of blue skies that they're known for. But we really, really enjoyed it there. Yeah, regardless, it was an incredible experience. You have to like wind if you're there, too. I think one night we were able to cook out. So one thing we wanted to note, you know, that southern Saskatchewan, when you're driving through, you really get an idea of just how vast it is and a sense of isolation and remoteness, which is just amazing. We saw, I think, one day, you know, eight cars over the course of a day. So it's just beautiful that way. There's a few small towns. I mean, we're talking populations of around 100, 120. Valmarie, which is sort of the gateway to Grasslands, is a good example. Our nice little coffee shop. And in fact, the coffee shop is actually their old schoolhouse. Yeah, it's got a gallery and, you know, there's a basic grocery store and there's a hotel. There's a guest house. They have their own RV park, which actually looked quite nice. Shade, power. You know, they're incredibly helpful, incredibly friendly people. There was some home baking there, some pecan tarts. I think it's Robin Kerr was the baker, baked it in a home kitchen. And they were so good, I'm prepared to go back to Valmarie just for the tarts again. We got them in the grocery store. So if you can support those local communities, I think it'd be really important. It was a really great visit. We really enjoyed it. Yes. And so if you enjoyed this portion of our trip to Saskatchewan, please be sure to give us a thumbs up and subscribe to our channel if you haven't done so already. And we will see you on the road. See you next time.