“Early French-Canadian fur trappers called this area mauvaises terres à traverser, meaning bad lands to cross.”
I remove my reading glasses,
look up from the kiosk along the interpretive trail
at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology,
and regard the surrounding landscape.
It looks 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 see a couple of hoodoos
that look 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,
allowing them to weather hail,
wild fires,
and grazing.
Along the valley floor,
I can 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 pinch a leaf between two fingers,
the powerful aroma is instantly familiar,
although it takes me a minute to identify it.
Turpentine.
Yes, definitely turpentine.
I turn to my travelling companion.
“Doesn’t this smell like turpentine to you?”
She leans forward for a sniff.
“No,” she says. “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 continues to be changed by erosion,
exposing more and more fossils every year.
This is 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.)
