“Early French-Canadian fur trappers called this area mauvaises terres à traverser, meaning bad lands to cross.”
I removed my reading glasses, looked up from the kiosk along the interpretive trail at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, and regarded the surrounding landscape. It looked like a desert, all hills, coulees, rills, and valleys, with a smattering of flat-topped benches, those iron-rich sand stone layers that are mostly resistant to erosion. Nearby, I saw a couple of hoodoos that looked like giant stone mushrooms, formed when a hard stone cap prevents the soft stone below it from eroding as quickly as the surrounding rock. “They are extremely fragile,” reads the interpretive post, “so please do not climb on them.”
The hills are layered in colour – white sand stone, deposited from ancient rivers; grey-brown siltstones, deposited by flood waters; black coal bands, indicative of decayed and compressed swamp plant material; and purplish-black iron stones, the result of chemical reactions in buried sediment. Each layer of rock is an ancient geological story.
These may be the Alberta Badlands, but the landscape isn’t barren. Prairie rattlesnakes, short-horned lizards, and western small-footed bats live here, although the short-horned lizard is Endangered and the western small-footed bat is a Species of Special Concern. In all my hiking trips in the Alberta Badlands, I’ve yet to see a prairie rattlesnake, despite the fear that my friends try to instill in me about hiking in this landscape. The greater danger of hiking here comes from unleashed domestic dogs and accidentally sitting on a cactus, not that such a silly thing ever happened to me.
A number of species of grass can be seen, though mostly on top of the stone benches. Grass species in this area are drought-resistant and have roots that can reach down more than 1.8 meters (six feet), allowing them to weather hail, wild fires, and grazing. Along the valley floor, I could see a trail of sage, some species of which were brewed up as tea by First Nations people to alleviate stomach pain, colds and coughs, and chewed to overcome thirst. When I pinched a leaf between two fingers, the powerful aroma was instantly familiar, although it took me a couple of minutes to identify it. Turpentine. Yes, definitely turpentine.
I turned to my travelling companion. “Doesn’t this smell like turpentine to you?”
She leaned forward for a sniff. “No,” she said. “It smells like sage.”
But plants and rock aren’t the only things here in the Alberta Badlands. There are also dinosaur bones. Lots of them. More than 70 million years ago, this part of Alberta was warmer and wetter, more like present-day Florida. It’s hard to believe that this flat, mostly-treeless landscape was once covered with magnificent cypress and pine forests, with hundreds of species of conifers, ferns, and flowering plants, and littered with lakes, swamps, and marshes, providing an ideal home for amphibians, turtles, fish, crocodiles, flies, beetles, mosquitos, and, of course, dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs, ancient plants, and other animals that died here were buried in sediment, which eventually turned to rock, creating fossils. They still may have been undiscovered if it wasn’t for the last ice age. As the ice receded, thousands of cubic kilometers of rock and sediment were stripped away, exposing the fossils buried in the rock layers. Today, the Badlands continue to be changed by erosion, exposing more and more fossils every year.
This was my fifth trip to the Alberta Badlands, an area that I find difficult to define in terms of space. I can’t say exactly where the Badlands begin and where they end. The parts I have explored have generally been along or near the Red Deer River valley, east of Calgary and south-east of Red Deer. And although I have spent a couple of nights camping in the Badlands, I haven’t found any trails that are specifically designed for back-country overnight treks. (True story: After three days of hiking and camping in the Badlands, not having spoken a single word to another human being the whole time, and covered in Badlands dust, I stopped at a Tim Hortons for a coffee. When I tried to order, my mouth was so dry that my voice croaked, and a wisp of dust spewed from my lips. My server and I stood motionless and awestruck as we watched the little dust cloud slowly descend to the floor.)
Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park
On my first trip to Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park, about an hour’s drive south-east from Red Deer, the road to the trailhead by the Red Deer River was closed, so I parked at the top parking lot and walked to the edge of the cliff, looking down into the Badlands, mesmerized by the gracefulness of a soaring red-tailed hawk. My goal was to hike to Dry Island, for which the park is named, which is a high plateau covered in virgin prairie grass. The area has never been developed, and bison, which once covered the prairies in herds as far as the eye could see, could not get to the plateau.
The park is the site of an ancient Cree buffalo jump, where large numbers of bison were herded over the cliffs to provide food for the tribes. It’s also a hotbed of Albertosaurus bones, although I personally haven’t discovered any dinosaur bones while hiking there. No doubt I walked right past some, since paleontologists seem to find them every few steps, but I don’t have the trained eye for such things. (“This is a piece of a dinosaur bone”, a paleontologist once told me, holding up what appeared to me to be a small stone. “Fascinating”, I said, stifling a yawn.) I did, however, find some bones from a more-recently killed animal, but I don’t know enough about these things to have identified the creature. I also discovered some large broken eggs that, although there are 150 different bird species in the area, I imagined being dinosaur eggs. Such is the mysteriousness and romantic nature of the park.
I met my goal that day, which wasn’t especially difficult, since the hike was less than an hour one way. But there was just so much to explore along the route that it took me most of the afternoon. It’s worth the visit, not just for the views, but to be able to say that you walked through ancient grasses.
Drumheller
An hour’s drive south from Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park, and still along the Red River Valley is the small town of Drumheller, which is the epicenter of a number of Badlands and dinosaur adventures. The town itself is kitschy, in that the streets are populated with statues of dinosaurs, each seemingly competing with the others to be covered with the most original colours and designs. Initially, I was appalled by these cheesy icons of marketing that seemed to cheapen the town in the name of Paleo-tourism, but when I saw children playing on them and laughing, I realized that the marketers had gotten it right – people learn best when the subject is fun.
At the information centre in Drumheller stands a 26-meter-tall, 66,000-kilogram Tyrannosaurus Rex, dubbed the World’s Largest Dinosaur, and about four times the size of a real T.rex. For a small fee, one can climb stairs inside the dinosaur and look out over the landscape through the dinosaur’s mouth. Not being a cheap thrill seeker myself, and frugal to a fault, I never went up there, but I could see that the kids sure enjoyed it.
Drumheller might be known today for the dinosaurs, but the town was built on coal and did not always enjoy a good reputation. An astounding 60-million tons of coal was mined here between 1911 and 1965, and the town was filled with brothels and bootleggers and crawling with ruffians. Thousands of Europeans were drawn to the area, advertised as Canada’s Miracle City, but the hard life of winter camping in tents without heat, electricity, or plumbing, the horrific injuries and deaths that occurred in the mines (more than 200 miners were killed on the job), and the ravaging Spanish influenza epidemic in 1918, led to Drumheller being called Hell’s Hole.
The true story of Drumheller, however, is one of resilience. I’m flipping through an older copy of the Drumheller Vacation Guide, which highlights three characters from the coal mining days. Madame Fanny owned a brothel in 1917-18, keeping order with a shotgun, but displaying such charity by providing groceries to struggling families. J. Frank Moodie opened the Rosedale Mine in 1912, hoping to create a model camp where workers were content, but ended up clashing violently with pro-union groups and hiring Pinkerton men to infiltrate and spy on his workers. And Thomas Belot, a good husband to Doris and good father to a little girl, who covered a shift for a sick co-worker on his one day off in the week, and was tragically killed when a large boulder fell on his back. Such is the rich human narrative of Drumheller.
Horseshoe Canyon
Horseshoe Canyon is one of two badlands hiking areas near Drumheller, and the most visited, where you can go off-trail and really explore the landscape. To get there, drive 10 minutes west from Drumheller on Highway 9 until you feel like you’ve left the Badlands forever and will be swallowed up by the Big Sky of the prairies. Turn right at the obvious sign, park in the designated area, and then walk to the edge of the cliff and behold the dramatic badlands vista. Don’t forget to start breathing again.
I’ve been to Horseshoe Canyon numerous times. It can get busy with hikers, but I always felt that there were enough places to explore and feel like I was enjoying my solitude. The Canyon is five kilometers from end to end and has enough hills, coulees, rills, and valleys to keep you hidden from other hikers as much as you want. You won’t have to worry about getting lost down there because from anywhere in the canyon, you can climb to the top of a plateau and get your bearings. That’s not to say the area is without danger, however (remember the prairie rattlesnakes? Brrrr). The real danger is the heat in the summer and lack of water. It’s easy for some people to get heat stroke down there with so little shade, so make sure you are prepared (think sun hats and lots of water and food).
The last time I visited the canyon in 2018, the cliff’s edge was lined with a fence and no one was allowed down into the Badlands. It seems that a movie was being filmed, likely a war movie because I could see army tents and a MASH-like hospital tent. Alas, my travelling companion, Evgenia, who had journeyed all the way from Europe to enjoy the Canadian experience, could only look into the canyon and pine away. She took it in good stride though.
Horsethief Canyon
The good news for Evgenia was that Horsethief Canyon, located 20 minutes northwest of Drumheller on highway 838, was open to hikers. Of all the places one can hike in the Alberta Badlands, Horsethief Canyon is my favourite. Most of the people who visit the canyon will only walk out onto the grassy plateau near the parking lot to enjoy the view of the canyon and the Red Deer River Valley. There is an obvious trail that leads down from the cliff, but only a few will hike it, and of those few who do, most will stop at the first stone bench. For the solitude-seeking hiker, this canyon, named because horses would often come out of the coulees with different brands than they went in with, is a paradise for exploration.
Horsethief Canyon has a special place in my heart for two reasons: 1) it’s where I saw my first Golden Eagle, and 2) it’s where I learned that bentonite clay, a bubbly-looking soil formed from ancient volcanic ash, when wet, is slicker than ice, and that when you step on wet bentonite, you quickly find yourself in mid-air, parallel to the earth, and staring with a naïve wonder at the sky, before crashing back to the ground on your back and thanking your deity that your egg-sandwich-and-pudding-filled daypack cushioned your fall. Sigh. I love this canyon.
Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology
I was surprised during my first visit to the Royal Tyrrell Museum. Given that it’s in the middle of the Alberta prairies and near the kitschy, touristy town of Drumheller, I expected less. But this is a world-class museum, and a working museum at that – you can even see workers meticulously at their tables trying to free fossils from the surrounding stone. I was disappointed that I had so little time to explore, which is why I’ve been back twice since. Most of the fossils displayed in the museum are from 80-50 million years ago, when the landscape was like present-day Florida, lush, with streams and vegetation, but without the expensive houses.
But the museum is more than just a display of dinosaur bones; it covers the whole spectrum from the Palaeozoic Era (ancient life) to the Cenozoic Era (recent life). You’ll even see bones of a woolly mammoth and a saber-tooth tiger!
Here are a few things I learned at the museum:
- If you are annoyed by mosquitoes today, know that even in late Cretaceous Alberta, they annoyed dinosaurs as well;
- When palaeontologists name new species, they follow the rules of taxonomy, which means using a genus and a species name, and it needs to be in Latin. Thus, Alberta’s first known alligator, named after landowner, Ron Stanger, and Jim McCabe, who retired from the museum, was called Stangerochampsa mccabei. (I want a mosquito species to be named after me – Insectannoyis davidus)
- The first fish appeared during the Devonian period, about 418 million years ago (and the first fishing pole? 417.998 million years later)
- A meteorite hit the Earth 65 million years ago, changing the environment so drastically that all of the dinosaurs became extinct, as well as many other animals and plants. This explosion created sediment that can be seen in the rock layers all around the planet – it’s called the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary (short form is “K/T” Boundary – don’t ask me why).
- Mammals were the success story of the K/T extinction. Even frogs, salamanders, sharks, and turtles seemed to survive unscathed. But there were no dinosaur survivors. (Darn, the mosquitos survived too)
- Early humans appeared about two million years ago.
- Here’s something I didn’t know: the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs only increased the speed of their extinction – dinosaurs were already on their way out because of an inability to continue to adapt to the changing environment.
- Dinosaurs lived on Earth for 160 million years; humans have been here for 1.2% of that time.
Dinosaur Provincial Park
Dinosaur Provincial Park was a new adventure for me. I had read about it, but never had the excuse to visit until my Russian-German friend, Evgenia, came to experience Canada. It’s about a two-hour drive east of Calgary. It’s typical of the terrain you would see at Horseshoe Canyon and Horsethief Canyon, but there is the added bonus of the Interpretive Tour Program.
Unfortunately, when Evgenia and I arrived at the park, the Information Centre was closed, so we wandered the well-marked hiking trails through the terrain and enjoyed a glorious sunset at the end of the day. Dinosaur Provincial Park lacks the remote feeling one can get at Horsethief Canyon, but it’s a great introduction to the landscape.
Note: Some photos are courtesy of Evgenia Shulpinova
