He Says: On The Dinosaur Trail
After a week crossing the Canadian prairies, we were both ready for some geographical excitement in our lives. Don’t get me wrong, the vastness and beauty of the prairies is something to behold, but there is only so many 300km dead straight driving days anyone’s sanity can handle!
Luckily for us, as we crossed into the province of Alberta (and crossed into our 10th and final Canadian province) the Canadian badlands emerged.
5 minutes apart…
Badlands is an area of dry terrain where soft rocks and soil have been eroded away, resembling volcanic rock. The resulting land is terrible for growing anything, and is difficult to navigate, hence the name. One benefit to this dramatic erosion is that the Canadian badlands are perhaps the best source in the world for uncovering fossils of prehistoric creatures (i.e. dinosaurs).
It was clear the moment we entered the badlands that this was a landscape unlike any I had ever seen before, and will probably ever see again. It’s hard to describe the sensation of driving over hundreds of kilometres of fertile prairie land only to blink and be driving through this.
One of the defining characteristics of badlands are hoodoos… or “doodakies”, as Amanda preferred to call them. Hoodoos are tall thin spires of soft rock topped by harder rocks, like these below from the Hoodoo trail near Drumheller.
We stopped at the Horsethief Canyon (so-named because outlaws used this area as a hiding spot for stolen horses) and spent an hour exploring the landscape... I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.
Our next stop was the Royal Tyrell Paleontology Museum – trains, space and dinosaurs were my core obsessions as a kid, and this museum did not disappoint. The museum illustrates the evolution of life from the paleozoic age, through the Mesozoic to the cenozoic ages, complete with fossils and artwork showing what life looked like in each period. We spent a couple hours walking around, and could have easily spent the same again were it not for the fact that we chose to come on a public holiday and the busiest day of the year!
I managed to sneak in a quick round at the Dinosaur Trail Golf Club. The original 9 holes of the golf course were built on boring flat ground by the river in the 1960s…it wasn’t until 30 years later that someone had the bright idea to build another 9 holes across the road in the badlands area. I’m not sure how they managed to get grass to grow over there, and admittedly there wasn’t much of it given how narrow it was, but it was 9 holes of golf unlike any other.
Secret to a happy life: give Amanda a beer and let her drive the golfcart
The town of Drumheller sits in the middle of the Canadian badlands, and is just over an hour from Calgary, the fourth largest city in Canada (and our next stop). Definitely worth spending a day out here to explore this landscape before heading west into the mountains.
