Oh Canada!

We made it in to Canada!  We had no trouble at the border.  He asked about guns, alcohol and cigarettes!

We took the back roads by Glacier National Park to get here.  It started off to be a beautiful day but we were keeping our eyes on the Rockies because they had snow and looked like they were getting rain and/or snow!  It was a beautiful drive and we skirted the rain all the way!  We came across some horses in the road, some cows and a couple of deer!  We topped off our tank at $3.92 a gallon in Browning, Montana fortunately because fuel was higher closer to the border!

St. Mary's Lake

Fuel prices till in the USA at Glacier!

Welcome to Canada!

We pulled in to a campground in Ft. MacLeod.  We had made a reservation because July 1^st is Canada Day.  The campground was very full and lined up waiting to get in on Sunday afternoon!  We have a good spot close to the office, which meant we have pretty good WIFI!    We decided to see if they had pizza in town and we enjoyed a very good pizza!   It stays really light until 10pm and the families were here enjoying the pool, the playground and everything else they have here until about 10:30!  We find we don’t eat dinner until about 8 pm just because it seems right!

Yesterday we toured Fort MacLeod.  The Fort was founded in 1874 with the arrival of the North West Mounted Police.  They were original on an Island surrounded by Old Man River!  They relocated in the 1880’s because of flooding!  The mounted police have an interesting history and we enjoyed the museum and the buildings.  The camp was operated until the 1920’s when it moved to Lethbridge, about 45 minutes from here!

We took a drive through town and one of the interesting buildings is the Empress Theatre.  It was built in 1912 and still has the original pressed metal ceiling panels, wooden floors and stage.  The dressing rooms complete with graffiti by touring vaudeville troupes!  When we walked by, they were showing Maleficient with Angela Jolie!

 Today we visited Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump.  Not a pretty thing to think about but very inventive for the Indians that had no horses or no weapons other than bows and arrows or spears.  The jump kept the Indians alive during the 6,000 years they used the jump to get the needed buffalo.  There are many jump sites, but this one stands out because it is the oldest and best-preserved site partly because the railroad never came near this location so no one knew it was here.  Geologists have found bones and artifacts buried in layers by years up to 10 meters deep.  The cliff was originally 20 meters high but is now only 10 meters from where the bones were buried.

  The cliff where the jumps took place!

Jump Simulation

 View from the cliff

 A doe by the parking lot, munching away!

 A Marmot sunning on the cliff!

 The jump took a lot of preparation.  They had to make drive lanes with rocks and dead branches that scared the buffalo.  They have great sense of smell but not sight so the Indians would have one young man with a buffalo hide on his back pretend to be a calf that was lost and would cry like a buffalo calf.  The herd would go to him, he would start running and the other Indians would then stampede them with buffalo hides and wolf skins on their backs and run them to the cliff so they would go over and die.  There were men down below to kill them if they weren’t dead.  They dried all of the meat, used the fat and took the marrow from bones, made tools from the bones and of course used the hide. 

The tale of how this jump got it’s name is that a young Indian wanted to witness the plunge so he stood under the shelter of a ledge and watched the great beasts fall past.  There were lots of buffalo and the young boy was found with his skull crushed by the weight of the carcasses, therein the site was named “head-smashed-in”.

Today is Canada Day!  Most of the campers have left this afternoon so things have quieted down a bit!  Tomorrow we will leave here and move up to Calgary for the Stampede with the tour group.  There are three other motorhomes here that are also in the tour that we know of.  They are from Texas and Arizona!  We are excited to start the tour and be at the Stampede!

Sightseeing in Canada…”Ain’t Life Grand!”