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Saskatchewan Road Trip: Places Worth the Drive
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items Saskatchewan is not just wheat fields on the way to somewhere else. Badlands and sand dunes, a lake you can float in, Prohibition tunnels, a T. rex named Scotty and some of the darkest night skies in Canada. These are the stops worth slowing down for...
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Real native prairie the way it looked before the plow. Bison, black-tailed prairie dogs in the West Block, and one of the darkest night skies in Canada.
Grasslands National Park
Pine forest rising out of the open prairie, and the highest ground between the Rockies and Labrador. Stop at Fort Walsh, the old North-West Mounted Police post, while you're there.
Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park - Saskatchewan
The water is so salty you float without trying, like the Dead Sea. Old Danceland, with its dance floor built on horsehair, is still going on the shore.
Little Manitou Lake, Manitou Beach
Just north of Saskatoon. More than 6,000 years of Northern Plains First Nations history in one valley, with a plains bison herd back on the land and walking trails along the creek.
Wanuskewin Heritage Park
Where the Métis made their stand in 1885. The white church and rectory still stand above the South Saskatchewan River, and you can walk the old trails of the village.
Batoche National Historic Site
Where the boreal forest begins. Waskesiu townsite, hundreds of lakes, and a long hike or paddle to Grey Owl's cabin on Ajawaan Lake.
Prince Albert National Park
Guided tours under downtown Moose Jaw: one tells the hard story of the Chinese immigrants who lived and worked down here, the other the Prohibition-era bootlegging legends.
Tunnels of Moose Jaw
Near Coronach and the Montana line. Castle Butte rises out of the flats, and the valley was on the Outlaw Trail, with caves where horse thieves are said to have hidden out. Book the guided tour from Coronach to see the most.
Big Muddy Badlands
Open sand dunes north of Sceptre, some of them still moving. Quiet, wide open and nothing like what people picture when they think of Saskatchewan.
Great Sand Hills
Home of Scotty, one of the biggest T. rex skeletons ever found, dug out of the hills near Eastend in the 1990s. Ask about the summer fossil digs.
T.rex Discovery Centre
A little piece of France on the prairie. The twin-towered church is covered inside with murals painted by its own priest, Monsignor Charles Maillard, over more than ten years.
Our Lady of Assumption Co-Cathedral, Gravelbourg
A giant steel-and-concrete moose at the Moose Jaw visitor centre, a fixture since 1984. A friendly rivalry with Norway over the world's tallest moose has kept him getting taller. Good for a photo on the way by.
Mac the Moose
Set aside in 1887, the oldest bird sanctuary in North America. Bring binoculars in spring or fall when the cranes, geese and shorebirds pour through. Easy trails and a viewing tower near Simpson.
Last Mountain Lake National Wildlife Area
Near Abernethy. The fieldstone house and barns of W.R. Motherwell, a homesteader who became a federal agriculture minister. A good look at how a prairie farm ran a hundred years ago.
Motherwell Homestead National Historic Site
A string of lakes down a deep valley you don't see coming until you're on the edge of it. Drive Highway 210 through Echo Valley and stop in Fort Qu'Appelle for coffee.
Echo Valley & the Qu'Appelle Valley
A small grove of aspen trees that grow twisted and looped for no reason anyone has fully explained. A boardwalk winds through it. Odd, quiet and worth the detour.
The Crooked Bush, near Hafford