Tour Details

Tour Dates

Saturday September 7th 2019

9:30am – 3:30pm

Price

$98.00 + gst per person (maximum 20 participants)

Seats must be booked in advance and are non-refundable; full payment is due on booking; we cannot hold seats without payment.

Included:  Six-hour geological and archaeological guided tour to Grand Beach, Lockport and River Road, with guides Barbara Huck and Peter St. John. Includes full picnic lunch, a snack, a 10-page handout with maps and information and a copy of In Search of Canada’s Ancient Heartland. Transportation by mini-coach.

Please note: This tour is not wheelchair accessible, as the minibus is not wheelchair accessible.
Short distance hiking is involved with this tour, please wear the appropriate footwear.

Your Tour Guides

Barbara Huck: An historian with a passion for archaeology, Barbara took a long detour through journalism before turning to writing, editing and publishing books as co-founder and managing partner of Heartland Associates Inc. Along the way, she has won provincial, national and international writing awards as a journalist, broadcaster, author, editor and publisher. She was the first woman in Canada to win a National Newspaper Award for Sports Writing and was awarded the Governor-Generals medal for community service as co-chair of the national and international bid committees that brought the 1999 Pan Am Games to Winnipeg. But her real passion is history and several of the 12 books she has authored or co-authored to date are national bestsellers, including In Search of Ancient Alberta, Exploring the Fur Trade Routes of North America; and In Search of Ancient British Columbia.

She has four children, four step-children and eight grandchildren, and is married to Peter St. John, retired professor and senior scholar of International Relations at the University of Manitoba and the 9^th Earl of Orkney, making her the Countess of Orkney.

Peter St. John: Peter St. John (pronounced Sin-jun) has had a passion for teaching for more than 40 years. Though he officially retired in 1998, following 35 years as a professor of International Relations at the University of Manitoba, in the years since he has been busier than ever. He has continued to ignite the fires of learning, not only at the U of M, but also at the University of Winnipeg, the University of Victoria, St. Andrew=s University in Scotland, the US Airforce Special Operations School in Florida and, most recently, to packed sessions at the privately run Carriage House Lecture Series in his home in Winnipeg. For the past 25 years, he has specialized in Intelligence, Espionage, Insurgency and Terrorism, developing the first course in North America on these subjects. In 1998, he also became the 9th Earl of Orkney and was patron of the first Orkney Homecoming.

He is the author of several books, including the seminal Air Piracy, Airport Security and International Terrorism (1991), and is also a partner in Heartland Associates, and the real reason the company is Manitoba=s best-selling book publisher.

Itinerary

9:30 a.m. — Depart Kildonan Place in a 24-passenger mini-coach. Enroute, Barbara Huck will talk about Manitoba’s ever-present ice age legacy, beginning with the impact of the last glaciation. The landscapes we will tour were not only created by the ice and its descendant, Lake Agassiz, but continue to change and evolve even today.

10:30 a.m. — Arrive at the Ancient Beaches Trail at Grand Beach
Following a brief talk about the trail and why it exists. Peter St. John will take participants up the short trail to the overlook where today’s Lake Winnipeg can be seen. He will explain how the lake has dramatically changed over the last 6,000 years.

11:30 to 1 p.m. — A short drive to the North Beach of Grand Beach to see some of Manitoba’s most famous ice age remnants, followed by a picnic lunch and a talk on the Belair Moraine, which extends from Elk Island to the US border.

1 p.m. — Depart Grand Beach for Lockport, with a discussion en route about isostatic rebound, the remarkable, reversible Red River and the continuing southerly movement of Lake Winnipeg. This stop will include a short walk to the fishing site at today’s Lockport Dam, a site that has been popular with fishers for 5,000 years.

Across the bridge, Lockport is also well known as one of Canada’s earliest farming sites, with corn and beans grown here dating back to the Medieval Warm Period about 700 years ago.

2 p.m. — Depart Lockport and drive down scenic River Road, with a discussion en route about Orcadians in the fur trade by Peter St. John, the 9^th Earl of Orkney, as well as the Orkney-Cree-Ojibwe mixed-blood settlement and the Selkirk Settlers of the early 1800s.

3:30 p.m. — Arrive back at Kildonan Place.