Prairies & dinosaurs – a drive to Drumheller
I couldn’t live on the Prairies, but I do enjoy visiting. Boring at first glance perhaps, but particularly if you get off on the back roads, there’s a grandness that is very powerful, and there are photo ops everywhere.
We made a quick trip out to Drumheller and back yesterday, with the Royal Tyrrell Museum the focus of our day. Fields are being prepared on all of the farms in this area, and it was interesting to try to figure out what some of the equipment rolling across the fields does.
We stopped at Horseshoe Canyon, and another traveler obliged by taking this photo of us all. I sure would have liked to have the camera pointed down a little, but you get what you pay for 🙂 My Mom’s family is from Hanna, just east of here, and I’ve been to Horseshoe Canyon a few times since the first visit in about 1955. It feels good to be able to tell my grand-daughters stories like that.
The location of Drumheller has fascinated me since I was a kid. You’re driving across a flat world and all of a sudden a large colourful hole opens up and there’s a town at the bottom of it. The town is just around the corner to the left in this photo.
The Tyrrell Museum is a wonderful facility for people of all ages. We spent 2½ hours there but an entire day would be needed for a proper look at what’s there.
The entire paleontological process is nicely presented, including having the labs visible (though no work was going on while we were there).
In the foreground of the shot below is a display showing how a bone bed is taken apart – the meticulous work involved is fascinating.
There is interactive stuff for kids everywhere, so while mom and dad are looking at what interests them, the kids can be playing with a puzzle mounted on the edge of the display.
Fossils of all sizes are presented, from the T. Rex and woolly mammoth down through sabre-tooth tigers, this little oreodon that died in its sleep, and right down to beetles and plant spores.
Some of the displays such as this night-time attack on a mammoth by two sabre-tooth cats, are very impressive.
Outside the museum there’s an extensive network of interpretive trails, but we only did a short one up to an observation area. We then went for a drive, looking for hoodoos but we were unable to find them. We should have thought this day out better (ie there’s a map of the Hoodoo Trail online!), as there’s a lot to see. The search, though, did take us to a great spot for Andrea to get another picture of her car 🙂
The highway back to Airdrie.
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