Writing-on-Stone

Milk River is 42 kilometers away from Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park (it's a Provincial Park because up here in Canada, they have provinces instead of states!) so last night, our homestay drove us out there to do some exploring.

I do mean, last night, by the way. We didn't leave until like 5:30, because it feels like the sun never sets here (ok, it does -- somewhere between 8:30 and 9).

It's called Writing-On-Stone because it contains the largest concentration of First Nation (Native Canadian) petroglyphs and pictographs on the great plains of North America, but we didn't get to see those. They're on the other side of the park. For us, Writing-on-Stone was more like Walking-on-Stone, because we climbed all over these monster rocks.

But first, let me take a selfie (stick).

The stones here are hoodoos like what we saw in Banff and Medicine Rock but there are a lot of them, very close together. They make the hoodoos in Banff look like absolutely nothing (not that that's very hard since the hoodoos in Banff weren't very impressive anyways, it was the hiking that was great). As part of our adventure, our homestay not only gave us a lift to the park, she also let us borrow her selfie stick, which we had a lot of fun with (it would actually be great for us since we go so many places but never have anyone to take pictures of us, even though it seems a bit pretentious).

We climbed from the parking lot at the bottom up to the (closed) visitor center at the top so get a view of the whole place. After that, our homestay left us to explore and went back down to the car. Explore we did. We climbed all over these things. The only writing we actually saw was some unfortunate graffiti (which, if reported, can cost a vandal $50,000 and a year in jail!) but we did get to learn about the First Nation culture when we were at the visitor center. Like I said before, Writing-on-Stone has the largest collection of First Nation petroglyphs and pictographs and is actually also called Áísínai'pi National Historic Site so getting to know the culture was cool as well.

We spent a long time climbing and getting lost (something we are very good at) until we made out way back down to the parking lot. Where we discovered that our homestay was not waiting for us like she said she would be; her car was there, but she was not. As Mandy freaked out (for the sake of the camera) about our dilemma, I read more about the First Nation and about how their creation story involves a muskrat creating the world.

I wouldn't mind going back for another hike if time allows it but if not, this was definitely another successful adventure!