Saskatchewan Winter — Sandra Herber Photography

In late February I headed out to Saskatchewan for some winter minimalist photography. It had been 2 years since I last did a winter Prairies trip: last year, life got complicated early in the year and I decided to cancel my regular winter trip, so I was very happy to be going back. The week before the trip, there were places in Saskatchewan that were the coldest places in the world, but in the few days before I left, the temperature rose dramatically. It had been -39C in Regina, but the day before I arrived it was 5C. Snow started melting in the south so I decided, even before I left Toronto, to shift the focus of the trip (after the first stop in Stoughton, SE of Regina) to areas north of Regina which seemed to have retained some snow.

After a late arrival (I got to my hotel near the airport in Regina at 2:30am) and then losing about 2/3rds of my first day to some rental car complications (which – on the bright side – allowed me to visit a fantastic patisserie in Regina), I was on my way by about 2pm. I did an afternoon of scouting and found the back roads a bit tough – not because of snow or ice, but because of mud! It was more like spring driving – where the thick mud tells the car where it’s going, rather the driver. Crazy conditions for February!

The next day, after a very welcome and very good night’s sleep, I hit the ground running just after sunrise. The farther south I went, the less snow there was, so it was clear that my idea to head north after this first stop was a good one. It was so warm that after lunch, when it hit 5C, I drove with the windows open for a while. Very different from the -20C to -30C temps I’m used to out here in February! I visited some great sites and stumbled across a few more photo opportunities – which made for a very nice and very productive day.

That night, I photographed two gas stations in Stoughton. After photographing some gas stations in Alamogordo with my friend Frank on my last trip, I guess I had gotten bitten by the gas station photography bug. It wasn’t a very pleasant evening - with a wild wind, the kind that rips the door out of your hand as you try to open it, but I enjoyed the photography part of it all.

The next day dawned nice and cold at -11C. I was happy with that more normal February temperatures: they gave me confidence that the back roads wouldn’t be as muddy and spring-like as they had been the first few days. The only downside was that on some of the less travelled roads, the ones with the snow drifts, it was a bit of a wild and bumpy ride. The drifts look like they could be light and fluffy and that you should be able to drive right through them, but the air and snow is so dry that they are like concrete. Driving over them can be a bit like being suddenly thrown into the tumble dryer!

This morning I first headed to the two grain elevators at Neelby. I had visited them back in 2018 and I was sad to see that one of them is badly damaged and probably won’t last long. I then stopped in the nearby town of Hepburn for a break and had a lovely cup of tea and some homemade banana bread at the Paperclip Cottage Cafe - Hepburn is the home of the largest paperclip in the world. In the end, that was the only break I took in an almost-ten-hour day. Conditions got great in the afternoon and I shot some nice minimalist scenes north of Stoughton, where there seemed to be a localized band of good snow, as well as some grain elevators that I scouted on the way into town. I saw a few coyotes, deer (of course) and a snowy owl. All in all, it was a great day.

My photo trips on the Prairies involve long, long days in the car and there is plenty of time to think about life while looking for photo ops. I remember this particular day because I felt settled into the trip (it’s always a bit of an adjustment the first few days) and every now and then I would find joy bubbling up inside me - joy at getting to be out there and having no obligation but photographing, eating and sleeping. How lucky I am, I thought!

Lunch on the fly from the Indian Head Bakery

The next day was another great day of shooting. I had lovely soft light all day and I took my time as I drove north to spend three nights in Yorkton (a normally 2-hour drive that took me nearly 10 hours with detours). I visited some sites from my scouting map - a map I have been building for nearly 12 years. Sometimes a site that I put on the map years ago has disappeared, but the map at least gives me a direction to travel in and the chance to stumble across shots along the way – old, abandoned homesteads, nicely arranged grain silos, a picturesque fence. It was minimalist heaven that day. I stopped at the Indian Head bakery for lunch - one of the many small-town bakeries I enjoyed on this trip.

On that day I visited the grain elevator at Baring, an elevator that had been on my scouting map for years, but which I’d never had the chance to visit. Old, isolated, wooden grain elevators are my favourites to photograph, but there are fewer and fewer of them left. Many of my favourites are gone now - destroyed by storms, lightning, fire or just demolished. I had the sense that I had seen and photographed most of the most picturesque of the old wooden elevators, but Baring was one I hadn’t seen. I try not to get my hopes up - it could easily have disappeared in the many years since I put it on my scouting map, but lucky for me, it was still there. A day with some fog in the distance and soft light was an absolutely magical one to see this old beauty. After photographing it, I stood in front of it for a while thinking about all the history it represented and feeling very lucky to have seen it and had the chance to photograph it in conditions which were pretty near perfect for me.

Back roads photography - the road to Baring grain elevator.

Near the end of my day, I stopped in Waldron to photograph the grain elevator there. A man stepped out of his house and came over to chat. I told him I had been photographing grain elevators on the Prairies since 2013 and he asked if I had a card to give him. “No,” I said, “I’m just an amateur photographer”. “And where are you from,” he asked. When I said, “Toronto”, he laughed and said, “Just an amateur, huh? You come out here all the way from Toronto to photograph elevators and you’re just an amateur?” That made me smile.

Forecasts for the next day (my first full day in the Yorkton area) were contradictory, so I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but when I opened the drapes this morning to a sea of fog, I moved quickly! I shovelled down some breakfast, suited up and got out there. The fog hung around for about an hour, making beautiful hoar frost sculptures of every tree. Every time I got out of the car to photograph something, I was greeted by that lovely Saskatchewan silence and I had to marvel beauty of everything covered in frost. Sometimes the fog was so dense that I couldn’t see very far and when pulling back onto the road after photographing something, I would just roll down my window to listen for a possible approaching car, rather than trusting my eyes.

I hoped to photograph one of the many picturesque old Ukrainian churches near Yorkton but was turned back when all the access roads were blocked off with snow. As I was driving back to the main road, I saw a car coming towards me and stopped to ask the older couple inside if it was possible to get to and to photograph the church. “There’s a church back there,” they said, “but no. You can’t get there in winter.”

Once the fog lifted, the skies were blue and empty as far as the eye could see. I purposely made this trip a little longer than normal so that I could take a day off now and then without feeling too guilty and this afternoon seemed the perfect time for that. I had lunch in town, a short nap and then I spent the afternoon downloading and keywording images, charging batteries and cleaning cameras. That night I shot two card locks, one old run-down gas station and one brand new one to add to my growing collection of gas station images.

I spent the next morning in town, waiting for clouds to roll in, which they did after lunch. I shot most of the afternoon – but it was one of those days when I didn’t find many subjects to shoot. The conditions were good, there was snow, but maybe I picked the wrong places to go. “They can’t all be winners”, as my friend Stan says, but it’s still always worth trying. The highlight of the day was when I was photographing the grain elevator in Gorlitz and saw a train coming down the track. I photographed it as it passed and the driver blew his horn at me – to warn me back, I guessed – but when I looked more closely and he was waving as he went by. I waved back with all the delight of a six-year-old!

Forecasts were contradictory for the next day (what’s new?), but I was up early in case I got good conditions first thing and, in fact I got good conditions all day – a good 10 hours of shooting. Great day! I ate a sandwich in the car for lunch, but managed to stop in Melville at Nellie’s Bakery for a break. When I asked what they recommended, she said their chocolate dip (my favourite donut) was very popular, so I got one of them. I took it out to the car and drove off to my next scouted site. I took one bite of that donut and thought, “Wow, that’s a good donut”. Then I took a second bite, and immediately turned the car around and went back to get another one. What a great donut!

The next day I moved on from Yorkton to my last stop of the trip. I had two nights left and nowhere booked so I had to pick a last base. I decided to focus on an area north of Regina which still had some snow. When I looked for a hotel, the first one I saw had terrible reviews (roaches) but then I saw the Manitou Lake Resort and Mineral Spa – and I thought, “I’m in!”. I had to make a rush purchase of a bathing suit in Yorkton – after all, who brings a bathing suit to Saskatchewan in winter? - but, after that, I was ready to enjoy the mineral baths. After a long, but very productive day shooting day driving from Yorkton to Lake Manitou, I ‘took the waters’ that evening. Manitou Lake is a glacial lake that is highly saline and mineralized because it has an inlet, but no outlet. Over the last 12,000 years, it has become so salty that is like the Dead Sea – you float in it. The Resort has three pools – a cool one, a hot one (heated to 38C/100F), and a very hot one (headed to 40C/104F). I spent a very enjoyable evening hoping back and forth between the pools.

The next day started off with a leisurely breakfast and a swim in the mineral spa. The rest of the morning, I just relaxed, downloaded and keyworded images and waited for some clouds to come in, which they did around 3pm. Unfortunately, they didn’t last more than about 30 minutes, but I stayed out, scouting sites I’d marked on my scouting map in case I come back to this area in the future. Then, after dark, I photographed a couple of gas stations in Watrous. At some point, a clerk came out from the Co-op store and walked towards the pumps. I asked, “Is it OK to take pictures?” – “No problem,” she said. She didn’t ask why I might be taking pictures of a gas station at night; maybe the answer is self-evident?

The famous Danceland dance hall - built in 1928 - the last dance hall still open in Manitou Beach.

Two of my (many) weather apps said there was a chance of fog on the morning of my second-to-last full day, so I excitedly looked out the window at 5am to – nothing. And at that point the apps changed their minds and said there was zero chance of fog, so it was back to bed for me. This trip had been so great, with lots of wonderful shooting opportunities, that fog on that morning would just have been the cherry on the whipped cream on the ice cream of the trip.

One that last day of the trip, I slowly headed back to Regina to catch the flight home. I didn’t get great shooting conditions, so I just visited some sites - new ones to see if I should return on another a trip and old ones to check that they’re still there. Unfortunately, the elevator as Stalwart had been demolished. I had visited in 2022 and, by happenstance, met the owner for both the Stalwart and Liberty elevators. I remember him saying, even then, that if someone offered him a dollar to take the elevator off his hands, he might sell it. I guess he decided it was better to just demolish it. Luckily the beautiful elevator at Liberty is still standing.

This was a really good trip. It’s not often that I get so many full days of good shooting on a single trip, but I got lucky on this one. I have a lot of images to go through and hopefully some good images to post soon.

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