Days 24 & 25 (June 7 & 8). Manitoba and Saskatchewan

From: Devils Lake, ND

To: Dauphin, MB, and Saskatoon, SK

Miles today: 287, 340

Total miles: 6116

On Sunday, June 7, I drove due north up ND 20, and crossed the border into Manitoba, Canada.  The officer there asked me if I had any firearms (crazy Americans), and then why I was entering Canada in such a remote location (“due north of Devil’s Lake”). He was away with my passport for a while, but came back with it and sent me through with a smile. 

I weaved slightly west to MB 10, which took me through Riding Mountain National Park. This area of higher elevation is striking because it is mountains and forest in the midst of prairieland.  It is also home to a large number of elk, bears, and other animals, although I didn’t see any of them.  Still it was very pleasant to drive through. 

Riding Mountain NP is interesting for another reason. It represents the edge the gigantic ice-age Lake Agassiz, of which Lake Winnipeg and Lake Manitoba are the largest remnants.  Lake Dauphin, which I went to, is another remnant, as is Lake of the Woods along the northern edge of Minnesota.  Lake Agassiz existed in part because the weight of the glacier, some two miles thick, actually depressed the land surface of the earth.  As the glacier melted, this area became a lake with about the same surface area as the Black Sea today, and larger than all of the Great Lakes combined. Periodically it would breach its banks and empty into some watershed or another, usually down what is now the Minnesota River into the Mississippi, or east through what is now the St. Lawrence River.  As the ice receded, however, the land surface rose again in a process called isostatic rebound.  As it did these drainage routes were cut off.  Finally, about 8200 years before present (this is from Wikipedia), an ice dam constraining the water collapsed and the entire lake, with the exception of the remnants referenced above, emptied via the Mackenzie river into the Arctic Ocean.  This caused sea levels to rise globally somewhere between 3 and 9 feet, in a matter of weeks or at most months.  Some have speculated that this event may be responsible for some important flood myths, including the Bible’s.

Manitoba Now and Then: Riding Mountain NP, Lakes Winnipeg, Manitoba, et al; Glacial Lake Agassiz

I spent the night in the town of Dauphin (pronounced like “Dolphin” without the L), back in the prairie.  On Monday morning, I took a short excursion east to see one of the Lake Agassiz remnants, Lake Dauphin. 

Lake Dauphin, Manitoba, Canada

After that I rode west for the rest of the day to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.  Much of my trip was over the Yellowhead Highway, which has apparently been a well-established route for hundreds of years, and perhaps long before that.  Along the way I chatted with people who commented that there had been a lot of rain in the past few years, and as a result there are ponds in many places where there are not usually ponds. All of this area is “basin,” apparently, like Devils Lake in North Dakota.  The amount of rain varies significantly from year to year and decade to decade, and with no place to go, the water levels rise and fall much more dramatically than in other areas.