Westworld Saskatchewan

Winter 2013

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Since then, we kick-and-glide types have sought alternatives. Today, I'm bound for one that lies just outside the border of the aforementioned national park. The Ness Creek Music Festival site, a short drive east of the town of Big River on the west boundary of Prince Albert National Park, is the forest home of an earthy and utterly original summer music and ecology fair held each July since 1991. The signature event has since spawned a bur eoning net ork of spin-off g w projects – in music, art, education, ecology – that keep the Ness Creek site active yearround (see sidebar). Among the many winter charms of the place is a 20-kilometre groomed trail network with ski-in cabins at bargain rates. The bonus, as I'm soon to discover again, is an enveloping sense of k . l y Allan Casey, (horse sleigh) Gordon Olson p14-19_Getaway_OutAbout.indd 15 community that money cannot buy. What with my late start and a few detours, the light is already fading by the time I turn onto the gravel near the village of Bodmin. Some 20 minutes later, I enter the cathedral nave of great aspens lining the Ness Creek approach. Here is the field where summer concert-goers park their cars. There is the stage. Behind it is a circle of small cabins with light in their windows. And in one of these, a straw-bale house, I find my host seated at a candlelit dining table with a glass of wine while reading over some papers. "I thought ya weren't going to make it," says Gordon Olson in his distinctive, unhurried Big River twang. "Are ya hungry?" I first met the co-founder of the Ness Creek Music Festival many years ago when he gave me a tree-planting job banging in seedlings at seven cents a pop. At the time, I wouldn't have guessed this rough-hewn contractor would become a great impresario of arts and culture. Even today, Gord's folksy, selfdeprecating manner disguises a tremendous list of accomplishments for which he prefers to credit others. The Ness Creek Festival is under board management, but Gord still owns the land and, like Woodstock's legendary Max Yasgur, he's famously generous with his sharing of it. "I'm not interested in keeping this beautiful place just for my own use. I'm trying to find ways to share it with as many people as possible." Indeed, resident camp man Bill Hudson Westworld >> w i n t e r 2 0 1 3 15 13-10-18 10:15 AM

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