Day 16 – Echo Valley Provincial Park, near Regina Saskatchewan

[Sorry, the pictures from this point forward haven’t come off the camera yet!]

While a very nice park, Echo Valley is one of the more boring places we’ve stayed on journey. I guess after you’ve been to the mountains and the badlands, it’s tough to find this landscape exciting. It’s nice, but very similar to something you’d find in Ontario. The campground is located at the top of a big valley that dips down to Echo Lake, but it doesn’t offer any spectacular vies, since the campground is surrounded by thick brush.

The day was also dampened a little bit by severe and constant winds. It was a very sunny day, hot when you were out of the wind, and not a cloud in the sky – but the wind was blowing at a constant 60 km/h. It got really annoying after a while.

We did venture down to the beach, which unfortunately is a drive not a walk. The beach was a tad rocky, but probably would have been very nice had we not been in the middle of a rainless hurricane. The water was frigid – surprising since the lake really wasn’t that big. After 20 minutes or so, and a couple rounds of “Lilo don’t eat that rock” we left.

All in all a pretty uneventful day. We drove into the little nearby town of Fort Qu’Appelle to get some beer and ice, took turns in the shower, and that was about it. Luckily the wind did die down as the sun set – which it does much earlier here in Saskatchewan, since these freaks don’t change their clocks for daylight savings in the spring. That also means the sun comes up at like 4:00. Crazy farmers.

Once darkness set it, it was a beautiful sky to look at – complete with some pretty intense Northern Lights, our first of the trip. They didn’t really dance across the sky like I had seen in the past, but rather sections of the northern sky just glowed this really eerie and very intense green for a few moments at time. Kind of cool, especially as it was accompanied by the howling of a wolf or coyote or something, and his/her pack of yipping little ones.