Cypress Hills

After our two nights in Grasslands we moved on to Cypress Hills Provincial Park, with a quick stop to see Scotty at the T-Rex discovery centre in Eastend. Cypress Hills has been described to me, as an awesome place to camp, an awesome place to hike, really beautiful, the highest point between the Rockies and Newfoundland. After spending two nights there I would only propagate the last description. From Eastend (small town in southwest Saskatchewan) we headed to the “centre block of the park. We arrived, paid our “park entrance fee” of $7 a day, and proceeded to the park visitor info center. The girl working there wasn’t a very big camper or hiker, so she couldn’t really tell us about those things, but she was helpful enough to tell us “the mini golf and pool are fun, oh wait the pool is closed… unless you stay at the resort.” After that exchange, Tessa and I decided that we must be at the wrong Cypress Hills, so we headed for the “West Block.” Here we found what we were looking for, rugged, scenic, quiet. So we set up our tent and went for a walk, and then came the lightning and the thunder. We made it back to the camping area before the torrential down pour started and took cover on a pile of covered firewood before the hail started. We were in the tent by 830 that night. The next day the sun came up and dried up all the rain, well most of it anyway… we went to drive to a hike we were going to do but only made it about 800m from the campsite. I managed to get the corolla so stuck in the mud, that I had to hike to the ranger station to get him to tow us out. So we spent the rest of the day lying in the grass in the sun, followed by a big meal and a beauty of a campfire. As we were heading off to Calgary the following day we stopped along the poorly maintained road to do part of the hike we had set out to do the day before, only to find out that the trail had become a cow path. It was latterly covered in cow shit, and was covered in brush grass and mud. I was not particularly impressed with Cypress Hills Provincial Park. One block was so overdeveloped it barely resembled camping and the outdoors, and the other block was so neglected that you could barely hike or drive your car through it.