02/03JUN15 - Grande Prairie, AB (via grande cache, ab)

Early Tuesday morning, 02JUN, we awoke to more elk outside the RV; this time young bucks.  After breaking camp, we filled up the RV w/diesel, & headed to Grande Prairie, AB.  We took the scenic Big Horn Highway (AB highway 40), with a stop at the Grande Cache, AB, Interpretive Centre.  It was a very nice Visitor Center with an interesting outdoor display of different fire towers & forestry cabins used over the decades.

We arrived in Grand Prairie, AB, set up camp, & headed to the Visitor Centre.  At the Centre we discovered that the free buffalo barbeque on Wednesday for visitors no longer occurs; but there is a free bus tour of town & surrounding area at 7PM sponsored by The Rotary.  Corrie decided to skip the tour, so after dinner Dan headed back to the Centre & the Rotary tour.  Dan won the prize for furthest visitor from out of town (Dan was the only person on the tour!).

Wednesday morning we headed back to Visitor Center to view the Heritage Discovery Centre in the basement.  This is a small but rather new museum w/interactive exhibits.

We then drove to Muskuseepi Park to see the other half of Grande Prairie Museum.  This facility is the original museum & the displays are the traditional static type, with no interactivity.  Although not as interesting as the new facility, it does have an outdoor display of original “settler” buildings.

http://www.cityofgp.com/index.aspx?page=413

Some of the interesting things we learned between the two facilities:

>the actual settling/homesteading of northern & central Alberta occurred fairly recently, 1910-1930; & the majority of settlers were Canadian & USA farmers looking for better land to homestead and/or escape the Depression

>there was a 1941 film about life in Grande Prairie & you would have thought it was filmed at the turn of the century – land was cleared by ax; cabins were one room & built by hand; farming was done by hand & draft horses; the railroad had only arrived in the 30s; there were many one room schools throughout the area, not because there were few kids, but because kids had to walk to school & the school had to be close to each group of kids

>up to the 1930s many homesteaders traveled to their new homesteads in what were called “cabooses” - wooden wagons w/canvas covers, on wheels in the summer or sleigh runners in the winter; these cabooses often served as their only shelter for the first year

>the local populations of the Yukon Territory, & northern parts of British Columbia & Alberta, were outnumbered by US Army personnel (sometimes ten to one) sent to build the AlCan Highway, the Canol Pipeline, & airfields to ferry tens of thousands of aircraft to Russia, during WWII

>the history of the Sudeten refugees, which no country would accept until Canada said yes

After a pleasant day sightseeing, it was back to the RV to just rest & relax since heavy thunder storms are rolling in.