Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/144909
moose "disappearing like smoke" into the forest, points out fresh wolf prints along the trail and alerts us when a ruffed grouse and her seven busy chicks wander just feet from our bike path. Buzz is a guide for Earth Rhythms, a Riding Mountain National Park-based tour operation launched by his former national park boss Celes Davar and Davar's wife Susan. The company collaborates with some 50 area partners to offer customized group outings that range from yoga, photography and art expeditions to "first light" morning 36 W E S T W O R L D p34-39_Prison_InPark.indd 36 >> wildlife treks and today's family bike trip. When Buzz dismounts at our noon-hour pit stop and starts emptying his backpack, I am speechless with delight and ravenous hunger. Container upon container miraculously appears from the minuscule bag – curried chicken salad with raisins, fresh cilantro-laced salsa, sun-dried tomato hummus, bottles of Boylan's Birch Beer, a saskatoon-berry tart and chunks of dark chocolate. All served in style with real silverware and cloth napkins. In the sanctity of this cleared meadow set in the middle of a dense aspen parkland, a sense of solitude and secrecy begins to seep in. What appears to be a rustic camping spot, complete with firepits and picnic tables, takes on new meaning as Buzz brings another surprise out of his pack. It's a scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings and black-and-white photos of men in uniforms and army boots. "On October 26, 1943, 450 German soldiers arrived at this prisoner of war camp," says Buzz, explaining why this particular Earth Rhythms trip is billed as the POW Bike Tour. He asks us to use our imaginations as he points out the location of what were once dormitories, a kitchen and the stables. From our vantage point there is nothing to be seen: not a structure or a foundation, not a crumbled piece of stone masonry. It's only when we embark on a walking tour that we notice the unnatural undulation of the earth beneath us. My son scales a strange cementand-stone boulder that was once part of the cookhouse. And we stumble upon a dugout canoe that was carved by the prisoners from a large Manitoba spruce. Time has washed away almost all traces of what was once known as the Whitewater Camp. Yet Bill Waiser has kept the story of Canada's POW camps alive in his book Park Prisoners: The Untold Story of Western Canada's National Parks, 1915-1946. As the Saskatchewan history professor tells it, the camp's location was determined by two events: a brutal winter in 1942 that saw Winnipeggers burn through their reserves of firewood; and a fire two years earlier in Riding Mountain National Park that had left plenty of deadwood. Anticipating another chilly winter ahead, federal authorities located the camp at the site of the fire so the prisoners could harvest the wood. The Whitewater Camp was a large-scale facility comprising six bunkhouses, a cookhouse and dining room, an administration office, commissary store, barn, power plant and, given the remote location, even its own hospital. Oddly enough, there were no razorwire fences here. The dense forest and wilderness setting discouraged prisoners thinking about making a break for it. The weather also helped. One group of 19 men who wandered from the camp just days after their arrival were halted by a snowstorm and found cold, hungry and disoriented within 24 hours. The Germans, many of whom had been captured in North Africa, were held in Egypt before being shipped to England and eventu- SUMMER 2012 4/13/12 12:35:50 PM