Canoeing the Milk River

My cousin Kevin, his girlfriend Astrid and my buddy Eric did a two day canoe trip down the Milk River. The section we did is just on the Alberta side of the Alberta - Montana border. We started in the town of Milk River which is the warmest, driest place in Alberta and went to Writing on Stone Provincial Park – the nicest provincial park I have visited in Alberta. You wouldn’t know that it was the warmest and driest when we were there though. I was very green from the unusual amounts of spring rain this year.

The first day was a little bit technical. There were a lot of rocks to avoid and due to the murky colour of the water it was hard to tell where it was shallow. We were expecting more action though as our map pointed out a couple of class 3 rapids. There was nothing close to a class 3. We paddled through 50 km of prairie and the river banks got bigger and we started to see more hoodoos as we got closer to our camp site.

The Camp site (Poverty Rock) was really nice. It had a cook shack that seemed to be more for drying wet gear for people who go in the drink. It had a really nice fire pit and beautiful views. We were tired and expected to sleep well. I fell right asleep but was soon woken by the wind. The wind was hitting the side of the tent which compromises it’s ability to stay up. We got out and rotated the tent into the wind, but it was still noisy. Then the storm came. I’m sure that there were several lighting strikes within 500 meters from our tents. The rain was definitely heavy enough to be in the “cats and dogs” category. After the rain, the wind came back and had shifted again, blowing at the side of the tent. We decided to take it down and sleep in the cook shack with the mice but when we took the fly off, the wind let up a little and passed through the tent easier. We slept until the daytime heat was no longer bearable.

The second day was much less technical but more scenic. We saw Owls, falcons, hawks, more swallows, and many birds I had never seen before. We were in awe the whole day. The scenery just got more spectacular as the trip went on. We only covered 20km the second day, but we could have spent several days exploring the hoodoos and coulees.