Badlands, Dinosaurs, hoodoos and Smashed in the Head Buffalo Jump

---

In order to take advantage of some very unseasonal warm weather, we decided to hire a car for a couple of days and check out some of the sites of Southern Alberta

Drumheller is about 130km out of Calgary and is almost certainly the Dinosaur capital of world. The town has a bit of an obsession with these prehistoric beings and is home to the Royal Tyrell Museum (one of the world’s largest dinosaur museums), the world’s largest dinosaur and a dinosaur of some form or another can be found on nearly every street corner. We didn’t see a copy of Drumheller’s tourism strategy, but we are pretty confident it read something like: ‘when in doubt, a dinosaur is the answer’. If nothing else, a visit to the Royal Tyrell Museum eliminated another occupation off the list of things we might want to be when we grow up. The life of a palaeontologist is one of sheer dedication, solid concentration and a love for things long dead. The work involved in extracting a fossil millions of years old is painstakingly slow; often taking up to 3 years to get some bones out of a rock. Not quite the rock ‘n roll lifestyle we had in mind.

The area around Drumheller is known as the Badlands and has a very cool yet eerie landscape which includes the hoodoos - odd shaped rock pillars that take millions of years to form. They just sit up there, kind of in the middle of nowhere. After half a day of driving, a yearning for sustenance called and we embarked on a trip that saw us drive over 11 single lane wooden bridges within a 6km trip - a Guinness world record. Between bridges 9 and 10 sits the town of Wayne, population 29. The Last Chance Saloon is the pretty much the only attraction in Wayne, and is one of the coolest pubs we’ve been to in Canada. Big thumbs up to the home-made shuffle-board table and the fact that they serve their beers in old jam jars they found in the basement a couple decades ago.

Day two of our odyssey and we headed south to Fort McLeod to check out the Museum of the North-West Mounted Police which was the precursor to the modern day Royal Canadian Mounted Police (the Mounties). The Mounties were originally formed to bring order to the Canadian West. Apparently there was too much illegal whiskey trading going on.

Head-Smashed-in -Buffalo Jump - probably the coolest named place on the planet. Head-Smashed-In is where native tribes hunted buffalo over thousands of years by driving the herds to their death, or near death, over the cliffs. The name comes from a native story of a young hunter who wanted to watch the buffalo fall to their death from the bottom of the cliff. Apparently he didn’t choose his viewing area too well and when the tribe went to survey their catch they found the young hunter amongst the buffalo with a smashed skull. This hunt was a communal event of much planning that provided the tribe with food and materials to last the winter. There is archaeological evidence to suggest that the cliffs were used for this purpose for over 6,000 years. It was hard to imagine a massive herd of buffalo jumping to their deaths as we stood at the base of the cliff - all the blood and howling half dead animals, followed by the processing of the meat, bones and skin. It must have been an overwhelming experience the first time a young hunter was involved.

Anyway, with the weather starting to take a noticeable turn towards winter - we’ve decided to get a bit of travel in before the snow sets in. See you later Calgary, hello Edmonton!

---