We left the hotel around 10:00 am and headed North on Manitoba 10.
An hour later we entered Riding Mountain National Park and paid our admission fee for the day.
Once inside the park we head for the East entrance gate. This gate was constructed in 1933 and is a great example of the types of entrance gates our National Parks used to have.
Now the park entrances have modern buildings, but I prefer the rustic and historically correct entrances.
Driving the 30 km gravel road to the East entrance and then returning back to the main road, we expected to see lots of wildlife. After all, Riding Mountain National Park is supposed to have the largest population of Black Bears in all of North America. We also expect to see plenty of moose according to the signage along the way.
In reality, we saw nothing. There was possibly something behind the tree line, but you can’t see beyond that, so unless the bear or moose is right in the roadway, you won’t see anything.
60 km later, we are back on the parks main road. We are still seeing warning signs to watch out for the moose, and we see lots of places where a moose would love to hang out, but not one moose.
We drove to the North end of the Park and got this view of the land below Riding Mountain.
We turned around at this point and headed South back into the park. We thought we would take the gravel road out to the buffalo paddock and at least see some buffalo since we weren’t finding any bears or moose.
Part way along this road we came to some serious tree damage caused by high winds recently.
We arrived at the buffalo paddock and entered through the gate. We are warned not to get out of our vehicle.
I don’t know why we have to stay in our vehicle, we drove around the complete enclosure and could not find one buffalo. Based on our experience of this park, there is a whole lot of nothing going on here.
We were fortunate to see this Great Grey Owl though. Much nicer to see them out in the wild like this instead of in a cage at the Calgary Zoo.
We also saw this Yellow Bellied Sapsucker.
At this point we are wishing that we could see a bear or a moose, so we head to a popular part of the park… The Wishing Well. Nice gardens surround the well.
We drop our coins into the well.
On nearby Clear Lake there is a lot of activity on the water.
We headed to the nearby town of Wasagaming MB where the Visitor Centre is located and we had a late lunch and bought the requisite souvenirs.
There were many stuffed animals and displays inside the Visitor Centre.
It is time to head back to Brandon MB and our hotel. We stopped at the Safeway near our hotel and bought some groceries and had our dinner in our hotel room this evening.
Tomorrow we will cross over into the USA and visit a State that we have never been to before.
If you wish to see all of our photos from today, you can find them on our FLICKR site.
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