Well it was a nice Saturday and we needed something to do so since we have not been to the Fort Edmonton Park for at least a decade and most likely it’s been two decades we headed off from Spruce Grove into Edmonton.
Now since this is construction season in Edmonton, our other season being winter, the traffic gods were making it difficult to get access to Fort Edmonton Park. At this time you can’t get to it from the Whitemud Freeway as they are redoing the bridge there and have blocked access. So you have to get to the Park from the east coming down Belgravia road or from the south on 122st. to get to Fox Drive. Then stay to your right at all times or you end back up on the Whitemud just to keep going in circles.
But once you get there, there you are, standing in line to pay for your ticket. Seems to me they could have had a few more ticket sellers to make this line a bit faster, but it was a nice day and we were in no special hurry. So there we were.
Once we paid they did give us two fine maps with lots of information on them but the print was far too small to be useful while walking or riding in a street car to read clearly. But once you are stationary and have your reading glasses on, the maps are great.
I am using one now to help remember the names of what I saw.
Once we had time to get our bearings from the maps we decided to take the street car to the end of its run and walk behind the 1885 street over to the Old Fort and then back via the 1885 street, then the 1905 Street then finally the 1920’s Street.
I remember the first time I was at Fort Edmonton. My work took me there almost 40 years ago now, just as they were reconstructing the old fort. I remember a worker there gave me a brief rundown on how they were doing it. From old plans they had scraped together they were trying to reconstruct it using the same tools and materials that were available when originally constructed near today’s Alberta Legislative grounds. For some reason what stuck was the fact that they imported glass from England from a manufacture that still made glass of the same poor quality they had back in the 1800’s. None of the other streets, street cars, trains where there at all. Just some poor carpenters trying to figure out how they did things a 170 years prior.
Anyway over the years I have to say they have really done a fine job and the park is really a world class destination. It’s one of those places locals should try to get to at least once a decade just to take in the changes. But I digress.
Once off the pleasant Street car ride we walked over to the fort and somehow came in the back way. After going through a couple of the buildings surrounding the main court yard we found a fur bail making demonstration happening in the court yard. The young actors pretending to be voyagers in costume were showing how they compressed the fur pelts into bails, for easy hauling back to England via Hudson’s bay by river. The bails could weigh up to 90 lbs and one young lady did indeed pick it up and run it off down to the river.
After traipsing through the various buildings within the fort and spending quite a bit of time in the Rowand House, we headed up to 1885 street.
The first people we met were the Ottewells at their homestead, a very nice hard working couple, indeed. We then meandered up the 1885 street checking out the various buildings and costumed actors within. We than ran into the Jasper house where we were able to find some soup and a sandwich.
We kept going up through 1905 street and up to the 1920 street where we found some ice cream at Bill’s Confectionary.
We finally made our way back to where we started and took a train ride on the train that was used for the movie the “Assassination of Jessie James” staring Brad Pitt. The conductor on our car was a hoot; he was even able to speak some Chinese!
We arrived at the park at around noon and left just after 5 pm. By no means did we take in everything the park has to offer in 5 hours. We could have stayed two or three days and not have seen it all. We had a great time and hope to be able to come by more often.