Riding Mountain National Park is a national park in Manitoba, Canada. The park sits atop the Manitoba Escarpment. Consisting of a protected area 2,969 km2 (1,146 sq mi), the forested parkland stands in sharp contrast to the surrounding prairie farmland. It was designated a National Park because it protects three different ecosystems that converge in the area; grasslands, upland boreal and eastern deciduous forests. The park is home to wolves, moose, elk, black bears, hundreds of bird species, countless insects and a captive bison herd. It is most easily reached by Highway 10 which passes through the park. The south entrance is at the townsite of Wasagaming, which is the only commercial centre within the park boundaries.
The park was first protected in 1929 and had much of its public infrastructure created during the 1930s by labourers participating in Canada's great depression relief programs. Much of this early construction survives to this day. During World War II it was home to a prisoner of war camp which has since been dismantled. In 1986, Riding Mountain was designated a biosphere reserve by UNESCO.
Read more about Riding Mountain National Park: Park Access, Wildlife, Activities, Grey Owl, 75th Anniversary, Photo Gallery
Famous quotes containing the words riding, mountain, national and/or park:
“Holland is a dream, Monsieur, a dream of gold and smoke—smokier by day, more gilded by night. And night and day that dream is peopled with Lohengrins like these, dreamily riding their black bicycles with high handle-bars, funereal swans constantly drifting throughout the whole country, around the seas, along the canals.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“Nor has science sufficient humanity, so long as the naturalist overlooks the wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world; of which he is lord, not because he is the most subtile inhabitant, but because he is its head and heart, and finds something of himself in every great and small thing, in every mountain stratum, in every new law of color, fact of astronomy, or atmospheric influence which observation or analysis lay open.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“This is the first national administration we’ve ever seen where the housewife couldn’t afford to buy groceries and the farmer couldn’t afford to grow them.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“The park is filled with night and fog,
The veils are drawn about the world,”
—Sara Teasdale (1884–1933)