Up and out for a “short” 2 hour drive to our first stop, Horseshoe canyon. The roads are so long straight, wide and featureless people must go into a trance to call a 2 hour drive “short”. But it was worth it.
This canyon appears out of nowhere. The countryside surrounding Calgary is pretty flat grassland or crop meadows and then all of a sudden a deep ravine appears. Carved by glacier runoff, the earth has been etched deeply exposing distinct layers of mud, ash and rock. The colours are amazing but this was just a taste.
Next we head down the road to the town of Drumhella, fully situated at the bottom of the sudden valley. We were here to check out the Royal Tyrrell Museum that houses some incredible fossils found across the Alberta Badlands. This area used to be the bottom of a sea, or a forest or a wetland over it’s history and so the striped layers contain distinct fossils from those time periods. It’s one of the most incredible places in the world to discover fossils, including the best-preserved, most complete Triceratops skull in Canada.
We spent several hours going around this amazing museum looking at all the fossils. The variety was incredible and also the delicacy of detail that survived was incredible. Some of the details of the serrations on teeth and fronds coming off sea creatures were perfectly visible millions of years after they died.
I can also fully understand why the TRex was cast as the ultimate baddy in dinosaur films. It’s massive and would definitely be a terrifying sight to encounter. I had aimi stand beneath it and do her best impression of being afraid… I’m sure if it was alive she would do a more convincing job.
There is so much there I’m not going to relate it all very well in my blog, but I can fully recommend a visit. It was fascinating, especially because you can buy real life dinosaurs in the gift shop, made from plastic, made from oil, made from dinosaurs. 100% organic dinosaurs.
After a coffee and a bite to eat we head a short way down the road to a suspension bridge near Rosedale, the Star Mine Suspension Bridge. This is just for foot traffic over the wide river leading to an old mine. The pylons were made from wood and the steel mesh footboards hung from cables so it was a bit wobbly for Julia who head back. But we crossed over and had a mooch around. There was also a geocache here I took 5 mins to find. With a decent size logbook it qas fun to record all our names and funny titles.
Moving along the valley we had one last stop. The museum had said that the layers shown in the valley walls travel back over 65 million years revealing distinct periods of the earths history. We now came to see the Hoodoo’s. Towers of rock topped with a flat stone. Thought to be the petrified statues of evil giants, they are actually a natural process. The top rock layer is densely compacted rock, much more hard wearing than the deep white stuff below. This is actually ash, left over from a volcanic period that is much softer as it turns to clay when it gets wet. Over thousands of years of rain and erosion, the rocks withstand the beating, but the clay gets washed away, leaving the rocks stuck up on tall pillars.
The result is a really weird alien landscape. The hundreds of mini ravines carved into the soft rock and pebbles rising up from them as if levitating. It’s so alien, but only if you look one way. If you turn around the car park destroys the illusion.
A “short” 2 hour car ride home and we are knackered. No cooking tonight, it’s pizza time.