Sunday, I was out along the South Saskatchewan River again, learning the riverside trails in Chief Whitecap, walking out through the bowls from someone who knows them well.
What are the bowls? I’ll get back to that.
First, the trails. There are two sorts of trails tucked in around Chief Whitecap Park: some official, and some very much not.
Some are straight lines that get you from here to there, or, more often, from here on the brow of the escarpment easily down to the water’s edge. The others are a second set of trails that are carefully switchbacked, planned and built to wend their way around obstacles, so that, pretty much year-round, they are easily traversed. They don’t have permission for their existence. They just are.
The bowls are the hollows cut into the high riverbank by the ground slipping down in huge sections, the sharp lines growing rounded after only a few years. The slump of riverine shoulders. Walking down into — and back out of — the bowls lets you see the variation of the river’s nearshore in a kind of shorthand: bluff gives way immediately to lush little valley preserves, bright round dips where the ground stays wet even when everywhere else is dust dry. The underground water that seeps up under the bowls is probably exactly what creates them, the liquid beneath that eventually slips the sandrow into motion. Grease for the wheel.
But there are no guidebooks to tell you where they are, and only occasional signposts.
A rope tied to trees at both ends might help you rappel down to a branch fort built in a valley: another route might take you past a sort of sleeping platform built high onto the backs of a bent pair of birches, with a foam cooler built into a wet seep to keep your food cold, a charcoal-black ring of stones circling around a cooking bonfire spot.
There was some hope of seeing a pileated woodpecker: they’re about the size of a crow and with a bright red crest, and there are a pair of them right now at the south end of the park.
I’m not a birder, per se, but I do like seeing different birds, especially unusual ones.
All I saw was the mammoth holes they left the in the standing deadwood, the spray of splinters and bark and rotten wood on the ground below.
But I did learn where all the bird feeders are, who built the random spoke-shaved benches and who set some of the golf balls that have strayed down from the nearby country club deep into the bark of many trees, so that, when you find them, they look for all the world like startled single eyes.
I know where the bottle dump is, the biggest of the beaver slides, and where a single open seep boasts a brave and solitary robin even in Saskatoon February.
And I started, just started, to meet the fraternity of quiet side-trail walkers whose footprints own the place, familiar and sure of just where they are going.
I’m lucky for that.