Ten O'Clock Light and Other Summer Problems

The first real sign of summer here isn't the heat. It's the moment you look up from the patio, assume it's about eight, and discover it's ten-forty and you have work in the morning.

That light is the whole point. Our summer is short, a little suspicious of itself, and liable to be interrupted by a cold snap or a week of wildfire smoke. But in late June the sky refuses to go fully dark, and everyone in the region starts behaving like people who know the clock is running. Which they are.

Start with the Stompede, because the season does. It sets up at Evergreen Park early and loud, with chuckwagons, dust and a grandstand full of people who will tell you it was better some other year. They're half right. The wagons are still the best show in town. The heat in the stands is not, and neither is the midway food, which is a ritual rather than a meal. Go for the wagons. Bring a hat. Leave before the parking lot does.

The smaller rodeos are the better argument, and nearly every town within an hour's drive has one at some point. Bleachers, a beer garden, a dozen kids running along the fence, an announcer who knows everyone by name. Nobody is putting on a show for visitors because there aren't any. That's the appeal.

Patios are a matter of temperament. Downtown has the people-watching, plus the occasional truck that needs you to know about its exhaust. The suburbs have parking and less character. The rule that matters: the north-facing patio you love in July is the patio you'll be shivering on in late August, when the evenings turn without asking. Sit in the sun while there's sun.

Muskoseepi Park does a lot of quiet work in this city, and it's underrated for it. The trail along Bear Creek is the best thing Grande Prairie has going in summer, and it costs nothing. Walk it at nine at night, when the light goes long and gold over the reservoir and the dog walkers nod at each other like members of a club. Bring repellent. The mosquitoes are members too.

Then get out of town.

Saskatoon Island Provincial Park is twenty minutes away and still somehow overlooked. Go in July for the berries the park is named for, which grow along the trails, and for the trumpeter swans on the lake, which do not care about you at all. Kleskun Hill is the strangest landscape in the region: badlands dropped into farm country, gray and eroded and quiet. It isn't big. It doesn't need to be.

The Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum near Wembley is worth the drive even if you've already been. Pipestone Creek's bonebed is one of the region's genuine claims to fame, and the museum handles it with more intelligence than you'd expect from a building shaped like it was designed to impress children. It also impresses children.

If you only make one long drive, make it to Dunvegan. The road drops off the prairie into the Peace River valley, the bridge appears, and the historic site and the old mission sit on the flats as if the last century and a half had been a rumour. People from the south assume this part of Alberta is flat. Dunvegan is where you take them to correct that.

Then there's the drive home in July, past canola so yellow it looks like a printing error, the sun still up, the bales throwing long shadows, and somebody in the passenger seat saying it can't possibly be this late.

It can. Sunset in late June comes well after ten.