Destination: Red Deer
by Paul Powley
To many travellers, Red Deer is a blur of gas stations and restaurants along the Queen Elizabeth II Highway. But even for those who stop to check out the city, Red Deer’s charm may not be obvious at first glance. Sure, there’s a pleasing downtown with a smattering of historic buildings, and Gaetz Avenue, the city’s main drag, which offers an impressive retail sideshow. But the true triumph of Red Deer, and the first thing locals say they like about this berg, is the way nature has been nurtured in the heart of the city.
Not so long ago, for instance, on a gorgeous fall day, my family and I went for a walk on one of the city’s many park trails. Turning a corner in the woods, we came nose to nose with a cow moose that looked as surprised as we were. Then it simply sauntered off into the bush.
Welcome to the real Red Deer, where nature blends seamlessly into the urban jungle.
Named after the local elk that early Scottish settlers thought looked like the deer of their homeland, Red Deer has a long history of capitalizing on its natural surroundings. Today, there are more than 100 kilometres of trails here, and efforts to add more never stop.
McKenzie Trail, for example, takes you from some of Red Deer’s busiest thoroughfares into the woods where the only sounds you hear are the wind in the trees and the whistling of the birds. At Gaetz Lakes Sanctuary in the middle of the city, a four-kilometre loop takes you around a pair of oxbow lakes where viewing platforms allow for spying on grebes, coots, ducks, yellow-headed blackbirds, beavers and deer.
Even elements of yesterday’s industry have been reclaimed. A former sawmill pond has become Bower Ponds, a place to paddle-boat or canoe in summer and skate in winter. Elsewhere, gravel pits have become a pond-filled dog walking park.
But other industries that built this city remain. After establishing itself as a successful farming centre, Red Deer rose on the oil and gas boom of the 1950s. Today, the city remains a major oilfield services centre, bolstered by being just 30 kilometres from Joffre, home to one of the biggest petrochemical clusters in Canada.
Its location along the Edmonton-Calgary corridor, dubbed an economic “tiger” in a 2003 TD Bank report, has allowed the city to punch well above its weight on the business front. As a distribution hub located halfway between the two cities, Red Deer counts more than 200,000 people in its trading area, making for healthy retail and manufacturing sectors. Again owing in large part to geography, Alberta’s third largest city has also emerged as a popular convention and meeting destination. With more than 2,100 hotel rooms, the city boasts one of Canada’s highest numbers of rooms for rent per capita.
But even if all this activity created the big-city opportunities that initially attracted so many people, Red Deer hasn’t lost the community-oriented, small-town atmosphere which kept them here. Besides ample opportunities for trail-walking, the wave pool, water park, indoor soccer pitches and fitness facilities of the 250,000-square-foot Collicutt Centre – and plenty of other pools and arenas around town – are testaments to a family-friendly attitude. Add to that the opportunity for easy drives to the province’s two biggest cities, to mountains less than three hours away, or to nearby Sylvan Lake, one of Alberta’s best recreational areas, and you’ve got a stop well worth making.
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