Although its landscape has been irrevocably altered, there will be camping again at the Woodlawn Regional Park.
The board that governs the park has developed a plan for 2012 that will see 70 camping spaces opened up at the main location which was closed last year due to the floods of 2011.
Councillor Lyn Chipley, who up until recently was the City of Estevan representative on the park's board, said the 70 sites opening in 2012 are primarily located along the road to the golf club and on the other side of the Souris River adjacent to the Souris Valley Theatre.
"Anything that was near the water is gone and probably will never be recovered," said Chipley. "The river widened considerably so a lot of those are just lost, period. But there will be 70 sites there that are recoverable."
Woodlawn Park was among the most devastated areas during last year's flooding. The raging Souris swallowed up a number of sites alongside the river's edge while the silt left behind created a whole other set of issues for park officials.
"I did a tour of it last summer and it was like Afghanistan," Chipley said. "All you could see everywhere were fallen trees and sand. You couldn't see a blade of grass. That river came up and there was two feet of water sitting over it and it left behind all the silt from the water on top.
"There is huge rebuilding work to do. (In the area near the river) the roads are lost, everything is lost, they need a whole new network. I can understand why they are doing (sites) where the main road is because that was not lost."
Chipley said she is of the understanding that the board will attempt to reclaim some of the other damaged sites in the main park area but will likely keep a safe distance from the river. The board is also looking east to the land that once housed the local chuckwagon track as a possible location for future sites but no final decision has been made on that. Chipley added the park's application to the provincial disaster assistance plan has also been approved, but she was unsure of how they will be receiving.
Along with the sites at the main park, the 70 sites at the Boundary Dam campground will also be open again in 2012. The sites were initially created to give campers another option in the area and also because Woodlawn was consistently full and with the flooding, have become an important part of the park's operations.
"That was good timing because we agonized over those; would there be enough space, would they be utilized, would everybody like them?" Chipley said.
