GRASSLANDS | Camping with Bison, Coyotes & Rattlesnakes
So after about 16 hours of driving in two days and crossing two time zones we are pretty much in the middle of Saskatchewan. So we plan to do some Backcountry camping tomorrow probably uh in a national park nearby so we're just making a nice hefty meal tonight and hopefully we'll get a good night's sleep tonight, out here in the middle of the beautiful prairies so that we are in tiptop shape for our hike tomorrow. It's a frosty morning this morning! There's water... We're off to a rough start. I realized when I put up my bag that the whole bottom of it is soaked and it's because my pouch of water has a leak in it and so all the water drained at the bottom of my bag. My sleeping bag is soaking wet, so is my pillow. Hopefully we'll have time to make it dry before tonight.
We're not even 20 minutes into our hike and we already spotted our first bison. They're a little far away, way off in the valley over there so we hope the trail is going to bring us closer to them but we'll show you what they look like now. Still works! Tendons are still attached. It's crazy. So we've made it to our campsite here and the way it works in this park is that there's really no organized campgrounds anywhere. It's wide open prairies so you just camp wherever you want. The only rule is that you have to be 1 kilometer away from the trail and the few roads that go through the park which we are, but we found a really great spot we have 360 views of the Prairies all around us we got a few bison over here about 500m away.
We have a big herd of probably over a 100 bison up on the ridge line, all the way over there. But it looks like they're coming back down this direction which is exciting because it would be really cool to be woken up by bison walking outside our tent. That'd be cool! I'll pull out the map and show you guys a detailed view of what our plan is for the next 3 days in this National Park. So what we're doing is we're basically taking two day hikes and then splitting them into three days of back country camping. Our first day today we parked our car here and we headed down timber Gulch Trail, it's a nice loop here and we're camping somewhere up here on the on Timber Gulch Coulee. Tomorrow we'll leave camp get back onto the trail finish the loop
all the way back to our car where we're going to restock on our water, because unfortunately no water in the park is potable even with filtering and purifying. We'll restock our water here and then continue along Bearpaw Sea Trail we're going to camp somewhere probably in this area here tomorrow night and then the day after we'll finish this loop, pick up our bags and then head all the way back to the car. So overall it'll be about 29 km of hiking over 3 days so it's nothing too crazy but we didn't want to push ourselves too much because as you might be able to tell from my voice I'm still a little bit sick. I'm not sure if I'm going to wake up tomorrow feeling better or worse so we didn't want to stray too far from the car in case I wake up feeling really bad tomorrow in which case we'll just head to the car and basically scrap the last day.
So we had an amazing night last night it was so calm, so peaceful and so quiet unfortunately we didn't get woken up by bison but we did get woken up by a coyote who was yapping we think right outside the tent so that was exciting! The bison haven't seemed to move all the that much since last night. There's still a big group of them up on the hill over there and the three closest ones to us are still just down here maybe 500 meters away and this morning while I was filming some uh some of the sunrise a pronghorn walked up not too far from me, maybe 20/30 meters. He was kind of curious about me, wasn't sure what I was doing there but then ended up just trotting backwards and kind of backtracking away. We're just finishing up our breakfast we'll pack up and then we'll head out and continue on our day! so we filled up our water, we had a quick little lunch. We came from that side now we just have to cross the street and head down the trail that way. so this section of the park is known to have lots of rattlesnakes and we just stumbled upon our very first one. Luckily, he's not right on the trail, he's maybe a couple meters off it
but he definitely shook his rattle at us. Luckily we have a good amount of space to go around him and that gives us enough space to get some close-up footage for you. As we were filming and slowly going around the first one, a second rattlesnake appeared just where we were about to step. Now we have two rattlesnakes that we either need to find a way to go around or maybe we just turn back at this I was filming with my phone here so the audio was very bad but what I was saying is that we were a little spooked about the snakes and that if we see a third one then maybe we'll turn back. After walking for about 5 minutes we saw a third one. Luckily, it was off the trail and we spotted it before it rattled but we were close close to where we wanted to camp, so we just decided to get to it and then think about what to do.
As we were walking down to that point just earlier we stumbled upon a fourth rattlesnake. This one was a lot smaller, maybe this big, kind of curled up but we've really enjoyed this hike so far the views are spectacular and the clouds have just been perfect all day. We've only done 5km of the 20 that we're supposed to do today and tomorrow but stumbling upon all these rattlesnakes is kind of making us doubt ourselves, question whether we should keep going um it's kind of made us a little bit uneasy to be honest. We don't have the right gear uh if we had Gators around our ankles we'd be a little bit more confident hiking through all this stuff, but we think we're going to sleep on it and I think in the morning we're going to decide whether we want to continue and do the rest to the 15 or if we just head back to the van and uh we would end our trip there. We think we've decided against doing the full out and back version of this trail. Without proper gear like Gators or cowboy boots who don't really feel comfortable walking the extra 10 or 15 km through rattlesnake territory so we'll just head back down the trail that we did yesterday, straight back to the van. It should take us a little bit under two hours.
So we made it out this morning without seeing a single other rattlesnake. We're very happy about that. We think it's because it's the morning and it's colder so they're less active, but whatever the reason, we're just happy to make it out alive. Overall, we absolutely loved this park. We didn't know Saskatchewan could be so beautiful. We're so happy about all the wildlife we got to see: bison, pronghorn, deer, fox, we didn't see any coyotes but we heard them a lot all night and of course rattlesnakes. It's also very secluded here, there's almost nobody in this park I think
we were probably the only people back country camping in the entire park, the past two nights. And even on the trails we probably only saw maybe four other day hikers. So overall 10/10 for this park and this area of Saskatchewan. So we're going to hop into the van and head out to our next adventure. I'm not sure where it's going to be but probably west of here.
2024-10-21 04:50
