You can’t help but notice how big the sky appears on the praries. You also can’t help but notice how monotonous the landscape is. The prairies would be a good place to live if you were the least bit claustraphobic.
It is raining when we pull into Spruce Woods Provincial Park just south of Carberry, Manitoba. However, it begins to clear as we are setting up. Lawrie was here about 24 years ago while on a fieldtrip during his Lakehead University days. He remembers the place as a small little park with these amazing sand dunes. What we get is this relatively large, well developed park still with the amazing dunes now called Spirit Sands.
Being the only ones on the Spirit Sands trail, we are free to take our time and poke around out in the dunes and let the pups run free. Not really classified as a desert, these sand dunes are left over from the delta of the Assinaboine River. After the last ice age this delta stretched for approximately 4,000 square hectares but all that is left today is the approximately 5 hectares enclosed within the park.
During the night, it starts raining again! I’m quite sure the farmers are happy.