Saskatchewan Guide

''You'd marry anyone to get out of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan'', Susan Sarandon tells Burt Lancaster in Louis Malle's film Atlantic City, and the whole province is regarded with similar disdain by many Canadians. It's certainly not one of the country's glamour regions, remaining as dependent on agriculture as it was when the province was established in 1905, and today producing 42 percent of Canada's wheat, 39 percent of its canola, 35 percent of its rye and 20 percent of its barley. Saskatchewan's farmers often struggle to make ends meet when international prices fall, and consequently they have formed various Wheat Pools, which attempt to control freight charges and sell the grain at the best possible time. The political spin-off has been the evolution of a strong socialist tradition, built on the farmers' mistrust of the market. For many years Saskatchewan was a stronghold of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the forerunner of the New Democratic Party (NDP), and in 1944 the CCF formed Canada's first leftist provincial government, pushing through bills to set up state-run medical and social security schemes.

However underprivileged Saskatchewan might have been in the past, its image as a featureless zone of real estate is grossly unfair. Even the dreariest part of the province, to the south of the Yellowhead Highway, has some splendid diversions, notably Regina's intriguing Royal Canadian Mounted Police Museum, and the coulees and buttes of the Grasslands National Park. On the Yellowhead itself, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan's largest city, has an attractive riverside setting and boasts good restaurants, plus a complex devoted to the culture of the Northern Plains Indians. Further west, Battleford has a splendidly restored Mountie stockade, while to the north Batoche National Historic Park, occupying a fine location beside the South Saskatchewan River, commemorates the Métis rebellion of 1885. Not far away from Batoche, Prince Albert National Park marks the geographical centre of the Canadian province, where the aspen parkland of the south meets the boreal forests and lakes of the north. There are some wonderful walks and canoe routes here, even though the park's tourist village, Waskesiu Lake, is rather commercialized.

North of Prince Albert Park, the desolate wilderness of the Canadian Shield is mostly inaccessible except by float plane; the main exception is the town of La Ronge, which is on the edge of the canoe routes and good fishing waters of Lac La Ronge Provincial Park and the Churchill River. By comparison, the area bordering eastern Alberta has less to offer, though the desultory prairie landscape that makes up its south and centre does incorporate some of the hills, forests and ravines of the Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park. The region's public transport system is limited, but there are regular scheduled bus services between most of the major towns, and a useful, once-daily summertime bus from the town of Prince Albert to Waskesiu Lake, in Prince Albert Park, and La Ronge.

The capital city of Saskatchewan, Regina is the commercial and administrative centre of one of the more densely populated parts of central Canada, its services anchoring a vast network of agricultural villages and towns. Yet despite its capital status, brash shopping malls and population of 204,000, Regina acts and feels like a small prairie town. It's a comfortable if unremarkable place to spend a couple of days, with the offbeat attraction of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Training Academy and Museum, and the opportunity to explore some of southern Saskatchewan's less familiar destinations - such as the Big Muddy Badlands and the Grasslands National Park. If you want to improve your suntan, incidentally, you've also come to the right place - Regina gets more hours of sunshine than any other major city in Canada.

Set on the wide South Saskatchewan River at the heart of a vast wheat-growing area, Saskatoon is a commercial, manufacturing and distribution centre with a population of around 236,000 - making it Saskatchewan's largest city and, in the opinion of many of its inhabitants, a better claimant to the title of provincial capital than Regina. Ontario Methodists founded the town as a temperance colony in 1883 and named it after the purple berry that grows in the region, but in spite of their enthusiasm the new settlement made an extremely slow start, partly because the semi-arid farming conditions were unfamiliar to them and partly because the Northwest Rebellion of 1885 raised fears of Indian hostility. Although the railroad reached Saskatoon in 1890, there were still only 113 inhabitants at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the next decade, however, there was a sudden influx of European and American settlers and, as the agricultural economy of the prairies expanded, so the city came to be dominated by a group of entrepreneurs nicknamed boomers, under whose management Saskatoon became the economic focus of the region. This success was underpinned by the development of a particularly sharp form of municipal loyalty - people who dared criticize any aspect of the city, from the poor quality of the water to tyrannical labour practices, were dubbed knockers, and their opinions were rubbished by the press. The boomers established a city where community solidarity overwhelmed differences in income and occupation, a set of attitudes that palpably still prevails, making this a pleasant, well-groomed place, albeit one with just a trio of principal tourist attractions - the Mendel Art Gallery, a branch of the Western Development Museum and, on the outskirts, Wanuskewin, a complex dedicated to the Plains Indians.

The 600-kilometre drive across southern Saskatchewan on the Trans-Canada Highway is crushingly boring, and apart from Regina the only town worth a stopover is Moose Jaw, once a Prohibition hangout of American gangsters, including Al Capone. Otherwise the rest of southern Saskatchewan is mostly undulating farmland, broken up by a handful of lakes and rivers, stretches of arid semi-desert and the odd range of wooded hills. In the southeast corner of the province, the lakes, hillocks and aspen, birch and poplar forests of Moose Mountain Provincial Park come complete with campsites, nature trails and a resort village. Further west, just south of Regina and near the US border, it's possible to drive across the Big Muddy Badlands, but these weathered buttes and conical hills are best explored on the tours that leave the tiny town of Coronach throughout the summer. Directly west of here, the Grasslands National Park is still being developed and extended, two separate slices of prairie punctuated by coulees and buttes that add a rare touch of drama to the landscape. Some 200km further, straddling the Alberta border, Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park is also well worth a visit, its heavily forested hills and ridges harbouring a restored Mountie outpost, Fort Walsh. Further west, the area to the northwest of the small city of Swift Current is home to the Great Sand Hills, a starkly beautiful desert landscape. Directly south of that is Maple Creek, a quintessentially cowboy town with Hutterite colonies nearby.