Rudyard Kipling passed through Medicine Hat in 1907 and described it as having all hell for a basement, a reference to the huge reserves of natural gas beneath the town. The gas was so plentiful that the city kept its street lamps burning day and night for years because it was cheaper than paying someone to turn them off, and it still calls itself the Gas City. Today Medicine Hat is a busy prairie city of more than sixty thousand people in the valley of the South Saskatchewan River, surrounded by dry grassland and deep coulees.
The landscape here surprises people who expect flat prairie. The river has cut a wide valley into the plain, with steep, eroded bluffs and badlands-like coulees. The name is said to come from a Cree or Blackfoot legend involving a medicine man's headdress, though the details vary. The Saamis Tepee, a giant steel structure built for the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics and now standing beside the Trans-Canada Highway, is said to be the world's tallest tepee and overlooks an archaeological site where Indigenous people camped and hunted bison for thousands of years.
Medicine Hat also has an industrial past in clay. The local clay deposits fed brick and pottery factories, and the old Medalta Potteries site, with its beehive kilns, is now a museum that tells the story of the workers and the crockery shipped across Canada.
For riders on the Cypress Hills loop, Medicine Hat is the obvious base. It has every service: fuel, motorcycle dealers, restaurants and hotels. Highway 41 heads south across the open plain to the Cypress Hills at Elkwater, a long ride with gentle curves, little traffic and huge skies. Wind is the main challenge here: the prairie can blow hard, especially in spring and autumn, and gusts can push a bike across the lane. Summers are hot and dry, often among the sunniest in Canada, with thunderstorms building in the late afternoon. Watch for pronghorn antelope in the grasslands and for deer near the river valleys at dusk. And carry water: the gaps between services on the plain can be long.