Dinosaur Provincial Park

July 12 & 13, 2009

Well our first holiday of any kind without Eric as he was at Penhold staffing for air cadets. Wow was that ever weird. I had a good cry after we first set up and all week kept thinking how Eric would have enjoyed everything. Because Eric wasn’t around, Katrina invited her friend Lonneke to come camping with us – which was great! The girls kept each other very busy and seemed to have a lot of fun. Dinosaur Provincial Park seems to come out of nowhere, we were driving around with farm fields on each side of the highway and were beginning to wonder about this campground. What an astounding sight when you first see the park – it is absolutely gorgeous and you can see why it is a World Heritage Site!

The campground is nestled in the canyon of the badlands and it is amazing. Our first 5 minutes in the campground the girls wandered away to explore and found a huge snake – you could hear those two screaming from across the campground! Our site was really nice and we decided we really liked it here so we extended our stay two more nights. The next day, it was absolutely gorgeous and as we walked around the campground again we came across a rattlesnake. Many people were checking it out but then the Park Ranger came and talked to us awhile and he proceeded to remove the snake and take him to where there were no people. Pretty cool but scary too! We decided to go and check out the lake that was nearby and on our way of the campground we came across another rattlesnake on the road making his way to the river. Wow two rattlesnakes within a couple of hours. After being at Lake Newall awhile we thought we should head back to camp as it looked like it was going to rain. Wolf and the girls decided to go tramping around the badlands and I was going to hold down the fort and just relax and read. Everyone just got back to the camp site when it started to rain...and man did it rain! It rained and rained, and rained, we kept thinking it was going to stop but there was no way that was going to happen. We gave up sitting outside and went into the trailer because it was pouring! Supper consisted of sandwiches and potato salad that night and just chilling listening to the rain. We kept looking out the window noticing that the river was getting quite high and people’s campsites were in danger of flooding on the other side of our loop. We weren’t really worried about it though as our site was far from the river but to our surprise at 8:00 p.m. there was a knock on the trailer door and it was the Park Rangers telling us they were evacuating the campground as the river was dangerously high and the road was in danger of washing out. We could not believe it! The ranger said to hurry and grab as much stuff from our site as we could and head up to the parking lot on the top of the canyon. Wow that was unbelievable, we were pretty lucky though the kids were a great help, everything was thrown haphazardly into the truck except for our BBQ’s and our tarp. We were getting pretty worried at this point because the river was right up against the road so it was now or never! We spent a very sleepless night in that parking lot as the rain didn’t want to let up and the wind was howling like crazy...what an adventure!

The next morning the Park Ranger again knocked on our door and asked how we are and then informed us that the campground would be closed until Friday! Yikes, just our luck! The Park Ranger said they had informed Tillebrook Provincial Park about what happened and to maybe expect some additional campers so that is just where we headed. We were extremely disappointed to leave Dinosaur as we had barely began to explore everything and there was so much to do and see but there was nothing we could do about it. We will go back one day as it is an amazing place to visit!