“Pic of the Week”, January 7, 2022: The Manitoba Maritime Museum, Selkirk

00 Manitoba Maritime Museum

Sometimes you can be pleasantly surprised by things you didn’t know existed.
So it was when I came across all these beached ships off the bank of the Red River in the town of Selkirk, slightly north of Winnipeg. I’d lived in Manitoba for the first 24 years of my life and had no idea it was there. My dad and I were on a drive exploring the local roads when we spotted it — dad can’t drive a car anymore but still loves to go for a ride, so I try to take him around as much as possible when I visit. The scene was surreal, these ships crowded together as if warming themselves on this cold snowy day.
This is …

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.All Trips / Central Canada / Manitoba / North America

St. Andrews-on-the-Red, Manitoba

St Andrew’s Anglican Church 00

One of the oldest churches on the Canadian prairies is St. Andrews.  It’s an Anglican (Episcopalian) church in the community of St. Andrews and is situated on the Red River — hence the name, St. Andrews-on-the-Red.
The church is more than 170 years old.  In the 1820’s, the stretch of the Red River north of (what is now) Winnipeg was largely settled by former workers of the Hudson’s Bay and Northwest Trading Companies, many of whom were immigrants from the Orkney Islands.  Archdeacon W. Cockran established a mission and built a wooden church here in 1831. This wooden church soon became too small to accommodate the congregation and a new stone church was begun in 1844 and completed in 1849.  The …

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“Pic of the Week”, May 25, 2018: The Flood Memorial, Grand Forks

01 Red River and Flood Memorial (10)

I’ve previously discussed how flat the great plains of central North America are.  Like the Amazon basin in South America, when there is flooding of a river over its bank the flat topography lets the water spread a far distance before there is enough contour change to stop it.  Obviously this can do a lot of damaged in populated areas.

The Red River, which flows through Minnesota and North Dakota on its way into Manitoba and on towards Lake Winnipeg, is one of the dominant rivers of the plains.  It seems like the Red floods every few years and usually a small flood can be reasonably managed.  But there are rare springs when the elements combine to make flooding particularly severe, …

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