Posts From Saskatchewan

We visited the towns of Lac La Biche and Cold Lake today. A grocery resupply in La Biche and laundry in Cold Lake. They both gave the impression of being little boom towns, a small "older part of town" with lots of new shops and facilities grafted on the side. Lots of new pickup trucks and surprisingly large car dealerships.

We drove all the way back to Cold Lake this morning to go on a shopping spree for some clothing. Nina needs socks and gloves and I need socks and long johns. These proved amazingly difficult to get as "the winter stuff is not in stock yet".

We took a few photos of the campground this morning as the light was great and the water on the lake incredibly still. Thereafter a series of minor highways (!!) before joining Hwy 155 north to a place on our map called Beauval. Along 155 we saw a number of bears, one small clearly brown bear scurrying off the road away from the traffic, one black but unfortunately dead on the side of the road and just before Beauval a mother black bear and two cubs. Unfortunately no really good photos.

The sky was gray this morning as we set out along Hwy 165 and it was not long before the rain started and proceeded to set in for the day. Thus the day turned into a long drive along a surprisingly good quality gravel road.

It was still raining this morning with a light mist so that driving south towards Prince Albert was like being in a green/grey tunnel.

Today turned out to be sunny, as predicted by the weather app on our phones and making it a good day for us to leave Prince Alert and travel the section of Highway 120 to Candle Lake which was marked as a scenic road on one of our maps. The good light also gave Nina a chance to get a few photos of the PA Exhibition grounds and some of its more notable sights.

We got a bit obsessed today with both Larch trees (also called tamarack) and lakes. Why you might ask. Well the larch trees are abundant along the side of the highway, some green and others various shades of yellow. We spent a good deal of time photographing them in the hope of capturing the color and structure of these beautiful trees. Also later we discovered from google that they are the only deciduous conifer, dropping their needles in the winer after turning yellow. There was also a touch of nostalgia for us in these trees as we drove through many Larch forests in Mongolia in 2013.