Cypress Hills

Today's itinerary offered a direct route from Lethbridge to Regina.  But my route (and therefore the family's route) took in a loop south from Medicine Hat so we could explore the Cypress Hills.  It was the end of a long weekend and there was a steady stream of RVs heading back to Calgary and the other prairie towns as we drove in.

The prairies are powerful places for me - thanks, I suppose, to long family driving trips as a kid and a fair amount of time spent living in oil towns in these wide open grasslands that fan east from the Rockies. As much as I love the Rockies, it was reaching the prairie east of Crows Nest Pass yesterday afternoon that moved me the most.  Endless rolling late season wheat fields back lit by the low sun helped, too.

The Cypress Hills are a small remnant of an earlier higher prairie - one long since removed elsewhere by meandering rivers flowing east.  Its height left it perched above the glaciers, so the partially forested surface is an extremely old one in this part of the world where most landscapes are young (if 12,000 years is young).  One of these photos shows how flat the upper surface remains - the very fact that it is higher than its surroundings means that there are few streams to erode it, except at its margins (and there, only slowly).

I find these little bits of high country surrounded by prairie enchanting.  Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba. The Turtle Mountains on the North Dakota-Canada border.  The Rockies are full of small mountain ranges surrounded by high sage steppe, but these are lower, more remote from the mountains, and much more subtle.

These were important places for First Nations peoples.  They harbored game, provided water and refuge, offered timber for shelter and firewood.  They were strategic landmarks.  They were often the sites of skirmishes as settlers moved into the region.  They have also shaped western literature and sensibilities.  Wallace Stegner lived south of here and wrote Wolf Willow about that time.