By the time you have this paper in your hands, I’ll be back from a holiday through much of western Canada.
It’s amazing how much ground you can cover in just a few days. In our case, it was much of south and central Saskatchewan and Alberta, along with southeast B.C. It was great to get away, although like most holidays, there just isn’t enough time to do all that you want to do, and once it’s over, there’s a list of things you wish you had done.
This particular holiday was with my parents. There were areas I hadn’t been to previously, and others I hadn’t seen in the nearly 20 years I’ve been in Estevan. Some were attractions that I’ve been to before, but haven’t had the time to enjoy since I was a child, such as the Columbia Glacier Field between Banff and Jasper. Now that I’m a lot older than the last time I spent actual time there, I’ll appreciate it a lot more. (Although the glacier has receded considerably since I was previously there. No summer snowball fight this time).
One of the destinations that was on my folks’ travel itinerary was the Big Muddy of south-central Saskatchewan. Mom was born in Bengough before moving to a farm west of Fillmore as a child, and hasn’t spent much time in the Big Muddy since.
Dad was viewing the area for the first time.
It’s an area you hear about a lot, but people don’t necessarily know much about it.
A lot of people have travelled to the Castle Butte formation south of Bengough, and it’s likely the best-known and most accessible part of the Big Muddy. But the region is much more than that.
If you really want the full experience, Tourism Coronach has tours of the Big Muddy, with options based on what you want to see or how much time you have. Castle Butte is part of a couple of tours, but a featured component is the Sam Kelly Outlaw Caves, and you have to take the tour to view them.
The caves provide great insight into the history of the rum-runners and the cattle and horse rustlers who used to hide out in the area.
The tour guide is a long-time resident of the area who is a wealth of information about the region, and has plenty of great stories to tell about Indigenous people in the area, the outlaws who used to spend time there and the other people who have resided around Coronach.
And the scenery, particularly from the hills of the Big Muddy, showcases the spectacular beauty of south-central Saskatchewan.
It would be a stretch to say that the Big Muddy Tours are the best-kept secret in Saskatchewan, and it’s amazing how few people really know about them, not just in Saskatchewan, but in Coronach. You would hope that in a community the size of Coronach, everyone would have taken the tours at least once, so they can learn more about their region’s history and see how beautiful their surrounding area can be.
That’s not the case.
Tourism Coronach was awarded a grant for all of their school students to take the tour, but those plans were dashed by COVID-19.
The town is facing an uncertain future due to the eventual demise of conventional coal-fired power, so tourism becomes even more important.
The tours are worth the drive. It’s about 200 kilometres from Estevan to Coronach, the same distance as Estevan to Regina. But to many people, the distance from Estevan to Coronach might as well be the same as the Energy City to Saskatoon or Winnipeg.
It doesn’t help that the drive to Coronach doesn’t have the greatest of highways, either.
It’s not just some in Coronach who take their attractions for granted, or who don’t think of what they have in their backyard as tourism. It happens all over the province and all over the country for that matter.
How many people in the Estevan area think of what we have in our backyard as tourism? But places like Woodlawn Regional Park and the Hidden Valley Golf and RV Resort bring people here. So do the Estevan Motor Speedway, the Roche Percee rocks, the amenities at the Estevan Leisure Centre and the various cultural sites.
You don’t need to have mountains or oceans or massive amusement parks or a large community to have tourist attractions.
Sometimes, it’s just a matter of having something that’s cool and unique that you can promote to the public.
