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bunnykidiary · 7 years

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Weekend Trip to Drumheller - the Heart of the Canadian Badlands (Part 1)

At a work breakfast recently, one of Rishu’s colleague’s shared his love for Drumheller with me. Fascinated, I google image searched it and was taken with the fascinating landscape I found there. Rishu wanted to plan a weekend trip for my upcoming birthday and had asked me to pick a place within driving distance where he could take me. I thought it would be nice to take a break from my never-ending love affair with the Rocky Mountains and visit someplace different instead. Is it strange that I felt disloyal to Jasper and Banff while doing it?

So this is literally all I knew about Drumheller before visiting:

there were dinosaur fossils founds there.

it had a pretty impressive paleontology museum.

there were “interesting looking” geological formations that would make for nice Instagram pictures.

and finally that it was a small town.

This is the magnificence I was anticipating gawking at during this trip.

Having visited a few small towns in Ontario last year, I was curious to explore something now in Alberta and leave with a few lessons from the people I came across here. Fortunately for me, I left with not just a few lessons and stories, I left with what one may call an “emotionally moving” experience. Dramatic much.

I’m at a loss over where to begin. There’s so much to cover that I’m going to divide this blog post into two parts. In the first part, I will share our time at The Royal Tyrell Museum, doing the Seven Wonders of the Badlands Hike in Midlands Provincial Park, visiting a tiny church that only sits six, admiring the Hoodoos, and walking across the Star Mine suspension bridge.

Pretending to be excited about entering a Paleontology Museum.

In the second part, I will cover in detail our trip to the Atlas Coal Mine, the East Coulee Museum School, and an old ghost town that is now abandoned, and finally some stories about certain women that were known as “Ladies of Negotiable Affection” back in the day.

Being a continual student of history, I’m always drawn to sites with intriguing pasts. Or perhaps it’s out of my love for drama that I seek out places brimming with juicy gossip and anecdotes about its inhabitants. For anyone who is even partially like me, Drumheller would satisfy your drama-loving instincts immensely.

The first part of the trip focused more on natural history. In layman terms, this is history of our environment and all the organisms that lived in it.

You might say that Drumheller came into existence in 1916. But that is only when it was officially recognized as a town. The noteworthy history of this place began way before any humans walked on it, or even before they existed as species. We’re talking about a time where Drumheller was under a shallow sea. And later when it offered a tropical climate with plants and a playground for dinosaurs (about 230 to 65 million years ago).

Imagining this guy coming back to life and chewing our heads off. One of the “-saurus-es”. Yes I’m aware of how dumb I sound.

If you’re interested in natural history, you definitely need to visit this museum. I know I’m coming back here with my kids one day, God willing. Don’t worry, I’ll read up before coming so I’m able to hide my ignorance.

Standing next to this giant’s leg and feeling puny.

I also found an ancestor of my darling elephants, “mammoth”-something.

Due to an extremely high concentration of fossils found here, Drumheller is called the “Dinosaur capital of the world”. Natural forces of nature exposed a unique type of landscape that in recent history shows a rich deposit of fossils of plants, animals and of course dinosaurs. The tracts of deltas, rivers and flash floods that carved through this region left behind a truly riveting topography in the form of hoodoos, boulders, and other magnificent geological marvels this place is known for.

While hiking the “Seven wonders of the Badlands” in Midlands Provincial Park.

Several times during the trip, I was amazed over just how different this region was from the Rocky Mountains and lakes, less than 300 kilometres away.

This landscape reminded me of a giant cake with many layers. Imagine all this was once underwater! If it weren’t for the water and wind that forced through it, we wouldn’t see these fissures and curves.

As I hiked the valley and complained of the awful heat and sun, I felt like I was in a dessert in Baluchistan or the outskirts of Karachi, rather than Canada or more specifically Alberta, notorious for its cold to all outsiders. Our hiking guide told us that once he had a guy in his group from Qatar who complained about being cold in 25 degree (77F) weather. Bewildered, he asked him, “cold compared to what!”

The Hoodoos close to sunset. Hoodoos are thin plates of rock that fared better to forces of erosion compared to the rocks beneath them.

This is not our car. We just thought it looked cool with the landscape in the background.

The Hoodoos are more prominent behind me here, jutting out proudly, and in my head drawling “Look lady, I survived!”

I would write more about Drumheller’s natural history that explains its one-of-a-kind geography but I don’t want to. I was never overly excited by it, even though I read some of it and listened politely as the museum staff talked about it. All I know is that whatever “stuff” happened over those hundreds of millions of years of history, it left behind a really epic looking topography. That, like I said earlier, makes for some really nice Instagram pictures and videos.

Here’s another thing that makes for a great Instagram post:

This tiny church was built the same year the first man walked on the moon. It is still sometimes booked for small weddings!

Finally, we visited the Rosedale Suspension Bridge, named after the town and built for the coal miners that lived here. It was also built in 1931 so I was slightly scared, especially since people didn’t respect the rule of “no more than 20 persons at one time”.

Rosedale Suspension Bridge stands today as a symbol of “colourful mining history of Drumheller Valley”

What I am interested keenly in, more than anything, is the people who lived here from the turn of the twentieth century to the time right now. It was their history and stories that hooked me, and I’d go as far as to say, even changed the way I looked at Alberta and its wonderful people. I will now post this and proceed towards typing part II that I promise will be filled with stories about the people of Drumheller and their lives. Till then, hope you enjoyed scrolling through these pictures and reading my rants in this part!

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