Day Trip to the Cochin Lighthouse

I haven't gone on a major trip since my journey to Riding Mountain National Park last autumn, so I booked off a week to travel out west. However, things didn't work out as I had planned, and my vacation turned more-or-less into a staycation.

Thankfully, it wasn't all for naught. I managed to get away one day, and I did a couple of little day trips throughout the week too. The day I got away I wanted to go as far north as possible, and I chose the Cochin Lighthouse.

The Cochin Lighthouse is just north of the Battlefords and it is the only lighthouse in the landlocked province of Saskatchewan. It sits on the top of Pirot Hill in the village of Cochin and shines a light out onto the nearby Jackfish Lake – or as locals call it, the "Cochin Ocean".

Leah Mertz became the tenth Saskatchewanderer in 2020, opening up a new decade in the Saskatchewander program. Much like past wanderers, she has a love for content creation, travel and a soft spot for Saskatchewan. Her journey in the program has been unique so far this year, so I sat down with her (virtually) and asked her a bit about the first half of herself and her time as the Saskatchewanderer.

First off, where are you from?

I originally grew up near Chestermere, Alberta, but probably around the time I was in middle school, I knew I wanted to leave. I went to university in Edmonton but it wasn't a good fit so I eventually moved to Vancouver and went to school there. I was there for 6 years and then moved to Montreal for 4 years. Now I'm living in Saskatoon and it's barely been a year, but it's already changed my life in many ways. I feel like I'm from all of these places in a sense; they're all a huge part of who I am. 

Two-hundred forty-three people currently live in Stony Rapids, Saskatchewan, which is exactly the same number of words in the whole Wikipedia article about the community. Stony Rapids is so isolated that it doesn't even have a road connecting it to the rest of the province. In fact, the only way to enter it is by private aircraft, so it would seem strange that the events in this hamlet would involve a continental-wide search and destroy mission that would bring World War II to the heart of the Canadian Prairies.

Details of the events in Stony Rapids are minimal, with several news agencies calling the Canadian military records "maddeningly brief". Fortunately, the events in Stony Rapids had several precursors, and by the time the people of Stony Rapids saw something in the sky above them, the military already knew what it was.

The first recorded sighting was on December 4th, 1944 in Thermopolis, Wyoming. Two men were standing outside on that crisp night and heard a strange hissing sound coming from above them in the distance. Looking up, they witnessed a large explosion and a "white disk" floating away from the area. The men couldn't see what had happened where the explosion occurred, so they jumped into their truck and chased the disk. Within ten minutes they lost it in the darkness, so they returned to where the explosion was. There, they found a small crater and metallic shrapnel. This was the remains of one of the 10,000 balloon bombs launched by the Japanese to turn the tide of war against America. It was also the first ever intercontinental weapon.