We arrived in Waskesiu Lake this afternoon and we can’t really remember when we were last here but it was likely for Anne’s 100th birthday which would make it 3 years ago now. We’ve spent a lot of wonderful family time here in the trailer park and just north of here in Beaver Glen. I see they’re calling this place “Red Deer” campground now. That’s pretty stupid. Its always just been “the trailer park” and everybody seems to have been able to find it just fine over the years. When we first started coming here you could still have campfires on this side but they stopped that years ago and restricted the campfires to Beaver Glen. We liked going in there when the kids were young so we could have a campfire in the evening.
When it was just Marilyn and me we would always stay in the trailer park so we could have full hookups. Beaver Glen has a limited number of water plus electrical sites but no full hookups and lots of the time we were in electric only sites. I can remember the kids packing water from the community tap because our Savanna fifth wheel would hold more gray water than it would hold fresh. As I recall we could go through about 2-1/2 fresh tanks before the grey and black tanks filled up so the kids would haul water in pails and pour it into the fresh tank.
One year when we were parked in Beaver Glen I got up in the morning to find one of my favourite leather sandals missing and the other one badly chewed. I suspected a porcupine and sure enough, that night the kids heard some rustling outside their tent and RJ confirmed the presence of a porcupine with his flashlight. “Puerco espin”, according to Karla who was with us that year, apparently liked the salty leather on my sandals. We eventually found the missing sandal but they were both ruined.
Beaver Glen was also a lot of fun when the bears wandered through the campground. I suppose they come out here occasionally too but the only time I remember seeing them in camp was in Beaver Glen. One night the rangers were in hot pursuit of a bear but it was way to cagey for them. They roared through the campground looking for the bear but he could cut across the sites and avoid the roads and the rangers didn’t really have much chance of catching up to him. I’m not sure what they thought they were going to do if they did catch him – it would be like the dog who caught his tail - “now what do I do?”
I heard a news report one summer about camper aversion training that the rangers at Banff were conducting. Apparently the bears learn to recognize the park ranger vehicles to the point where the rangers seldom actually see a bear. So the rangers were setting up decoy camps and hiding in the tent. Then when the bear wandered unsuspectingly into the camp the rangers would burst out of the tent with noisemakers and paintball guns. The theory was that the bears would eventually learn to avoid campers but I never heard how successful that program was.
Its so pretty up here, even in the rain which is what we are in right now. We left Candle Lake because it was all too reminiscent of the soggy summers we spent up there. We loved coming here to Waskesiu but decided that because Candle was so much closer to Nipawin we would make it our lake instead of this one. Neither of us ever really connected with Candle Lake so after we got our visiting out of the way the prospect of another soggy couple of days there was just too much to think about. I’d forgotten but several of the rows in the trailer park even have 50 amp plugs. That’s what we landed on so we’ll be able to run the electric heaters and electric blanket tonight.
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