Manitoba Guide

Manitoba is distinguished principally by its parks, thousands of acres of wilderness, lake, river and forest that boast wonderful scenery, great hikes and hundreds of kilometres of canoe routes. One of the best is Riding Mountain National Park, 250km northwest of Winnipeg, which derives its name from the fur trappers who changed from canoe to horseback to travel across its wooded highlands. On the southern edge of the park, the tourist village of Wasagaming is a useful base for exploring the surrounding countryside, which incorporates areas of deciduous and boreal forest, lake and grassland. Manitoba's provincial parks include the dramatic landscapes and difficult whitewater canoe routes of the remote Atikaki Wilderness Park, the lakeside marshes and forests of Hecla Park, and yet more canoe routes in Duck Mountain Park, which is also noted for its fishing.

Other than the parks and lakeshores, most of Manitoba's significant attractions are concentrated in and around Winnipeg, and many of the province's smaller villages and towns are not really tourist destinations. The notable exceptions are Brandon and Souris, both in the southwest corner of the province, and remote Churchill, a wild outpost right up north on the shores of Hudson Bay that's a great place for seeing beluga whales and polar bears, but overrun by visitors and documentary film crews. Elsewhere, Dauphin, Neepawa and Minnedosa are three of the more agreeable prairie towns, but almost all the other settlements are virtually indistinguishable, despite the diverse backgrounds of the European immigrants who cleared and settled Manitoba in the late nineteenth century. Most of them were rapidly and almost entirely assimilated, but the villages around Dauphin are still dominated by the onion domes of the Ukrainians' Orthodox churches, and Gimli, on the west side of Lake Winnipeg, has a pleasant museum tracing the history of its Icelandic settlement.

There are reasonably regular bus services that run between Manitoba's main settlements, and most of the village bus stops are within relatively comfortable walking distance of at least one hotel. However, nearly all of Manitoba's parks are difficult to reach and impossible to tour by bus, with the exception of Riding Mountain Park, where the service from Winnipeg stops right in the centre of Wasagaming; weird Park, where a bus passes through on the Trans-Canada on its way east; and Spruce Woods Park, close to the bus routes from Carberry and Brandon. VIA Rail operates just two train services to and from Winnipeg, each running three times weekly: the main east-west line connects Winnipeg with Toronto, Saskatoon, Jasper and Vancouver, and a northern line runs to Churchill, via The Pas, well beyond the reach of the road.

Running east from the northern end of Lake Winnipegosis and across through the isolated community of Grand Rapids, the 53rd parallel was Manitoba's boundary until 1912, when it was moved up to the 60th parallel on Hudson Bay. This tripled the size of the province and provided its inhabitants with new resources of timber, minerals and hydroelectricity as well as a direct sea route to the Atlantic Ocean. Today's northern Manitoba is a vast and sparsely populated tract mostly set on the Canadian Shield, whose shallow soils support a gigantic coniferous forest broken up by a complex pattern of lakes and rivers. It's a hostile environment, the deep, cold winter alternating with a brief, bright summer, when the first few centimetres of topsoil thaw out above the permafrost to create millions of stagnant pools of water, ideal conditions for mosquitoes and blackflies. There are compensations: out in the bush or along the shores of Hudson Bay you'll find a sense of desolate wilderness that's hard to find elsewhere, and a native wildlife that includes caribou, polar bear and all sorts of migratory birds.

The great slice of Manitoban wilderness that extends north from the Trans-Canada Highway between Lake Winnipeg and the Ontario border is set on the rock of the Canadian Shield, an inhospitable and sparsely inhabited region of lake, river and forest that's home to three of the province's largest parks. The most southern, Whiteshell Park is the oldest and most developed, with a relatively extensive road system, fifteen campsites and one-quarter of Manitoba's holiday and fishing lodges. Just north of Whiteshell Park, Nopiming Park is more isolated, with a handful of lakeside campsites that can be reached along two bumpy gravel roads. North of Nopiming Park, the Atikaki Wilderness Park is the most remote of the three, accessible only by canoe or float plane. The Atikaki's mile upon mile of rugged forest and granite outcrop are connected to the east shore of Lake Winnipeg by the Bloodvein and Leyond rivers, two of Manitoba's wildest white-water canoe routes.

West of Winnipeg, the Trans-Canada Highway slices across the prairies, past brilliant yellow canola (rapeseed) fields, on its way to Regina, 600km away in Saskatchewan. Dotted with campsites and fast-food joints, the Trans-Canada follows the route of the original transcontinental railroad, passing a series of charmless towns that are at the heart of the province's most fertile farming region. Brandon, the province's second largest city, has a handful of Victorian mansions and a lively arts centre, and lies not too far from Spruce Woods Provincial Park , a mixed area of forest and desert. Before you get to Brandon, however, immediately to the west of Portage la Prairie, the Yellowhead Highway cuts northwest from the Trans-Canada to form a more attractive route across the prairies, passing through the pretty little villages of Neepawa and Minnedosa before running south of Riding Mountain National Park.