Day 30: Pangman to Stoughton (this be oil country)

The beautiful day started with a 6am wake up (Hurrah! Our first one). Then Pangman morning coffee at the community centre- a very nice tradition, and we learned lots about the local area (thank you Eileen and friends). A low wind ride across the drenched prairie, lunch, and the makings of an easy afternoon...









Not so fast, our sweet and small little road with a very occasional car rapidly evolved into a dusty highway full of pick up trucks, dump trucks and tanker trucks and more, and for the first time in quite a while, a good number were not friendly or respectful of our space on the road. Then "they" started... first in ones and twos, but then more and more until they covered the landscape... Were they robots from Star Wars? Large black metal bodies with big orange hammer-head shaped heads bobbing up and down- aliens on the Prairie landscape?








Nope, in case you missed it, there is black gold in these Southeast Sasketchewan fields. So between the flooded fields and the oil fields, we kept on biking, hearing of a campground 25 km further than we had hoped in the nearest town. Tired and late we arrived to find a mud hole for a campground where we were nearly splatted by a jeep racing through the major mudhole which was supposed to be the entry driveway. Given no dry tent site and a boil water order on the tap, this was not a good choice. But what to do at dusk in a small town with no water?

We asked the first person we saw who was walking a dog as to where to get water. Within five minutes we had five gallons of water, a dandy and dry back yard tent side, a fire place and a picnic table. Tammy and Siggy were amazing hosts and we got a quick and multifaceted course in oil fracking from Siggy, who works on the wells.









People had known there was oil in these parts for years but only now can get it with new technological advances. They shoot special sand ($2000 a ton!) and a "witch's brew of chemicals" into the underground rock up to a mile deep to make fractures in the rock so that the oil seeps out to where it can be pumped up to the surface. That means lots of money for some folks and a boom for the local farm communities which had seen better days in agriculture. It is $1200 a month to rent a small condo and $450 a month to rent a trailer site in the "campground" (then you need to buy a trailer!). In comparison, you can buy a house in Southwest Sasketchewan for $10,000. It is a crazy world. Why couldn't they put windmills in the fields instead of oil wells? My gosh there is tons of wind out here and it seems like windmills would be a much better use for it relative to it's current raisin d'etre of trying to blow us off the road. It has been against us three of the last five days. Stay tuned, will the breeze be with us tomorrow or will it blast us once again?


Distance: 127.30 km
Time on bike: 7:09:07
Average speed: 17.7 km/h
Distance from Vancouver: 2343 km
Start time: 9:00 am
End time 6:45 pm
Wind: South ( low cross)


Cheers
- The Warpotay Team

Location:Stoughton, Saskatchewan