A World Class Museum in the Middle of Nowhere

A 90-minute drive northeast of Calgary, between the prairies and even more prairies, lies a medium-sized town that one of my coworkers call, in a humorous and slightly condescending way, "Dino Village."



Now that's not all condescending -- even the town's own official website is currently titled "Town of Drumheller - Dinosaur Valley," so there's a bit of truth in the humor. The town is actually one of the booming natural gas producing areas in its own right, though to virtually every visitor the main reason for the detour has to do with the region's rich fossil deposits, culminating inside a huge, well-organized and truly world class museum -- the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology.



Anyone who has ever taken a multi-day roadtrip anywhere in North America has the right to be skeptical of the word "museum" -- thousands of roadside "museums" exist for the purpose of showcasing anything from an old granny's collection of sewing machines to the amazing world of perogies. But Royal Tyrrell is one of the best in Canada, hosting 10 million visitors in its 25 year existence and granted royal status by the Queen. That's quite an accomplishment considering its location in a relatively remote region in southern Alberta, nowhere close to the main highway connecting Calgary and Edmonton. Visitors don't come this far unless there's a real good reason.



But why on earth would the government of Alberta invest in a world class museum in the middle of nowhere, as opposed to Calgary or Edmonton? Well here's the uniqueness of Royal Tyrrell -- the museum is situated right in the middle of one of the prime fossil-producing areas in North America, and some of the fossil displays were excavated within short distance of the museum. That includes the famous Albertosaurus, a smaller, but equally terrifying, Canadian version of the T-Rex.



Almost all exhibits were excavated from within Western Canada, with many coming from local sites in southern Alberta. Hadrosaur skeletons like the one pictured here can be found in the vicinity of Drumheller, while a near-complete nesting site had been found further south in Devil's Coulee.



Walking into any jewelry shop in Alberta and you'll find a uniquely Albertan gemstone with a wildly colorful, iridescent opal-like appearance. One of the rarest gemstones on earth, Ammolites (with an L) are organic gemstones made of fossilized shells of ammonites (with an N), a now-extinct group of molluscs that roamed the Alberta seas in the Mesozoic Era. If a fingernail-sized piece on a pendant costs upwards of CAD$500 (see Korite.com) in local jewelry shops, this 3-foot-diameter shell here must be near priceless.



Aside from serving as an interpretive museum to the public and raising public awareness to Alberta's rich fossil records, Royal Tyrrell is renowned in the academic world as a premier research centre for paleontology, complete with an excellent backyard for fieldwork. The Horseshoe Canyon, just a few kilometers to the west of the museum, contains some of the most abundant Mesozoic fossil beds in Canada.



Fossils excavated from the field are transported back to the lab for preparation and cleaning. To provide visitors with a real-life demonstration of the daily work in a paleontology lab, one of the museum's resident technicians set up a curator station with a working sample to explain the whole process of removing the surrounding rock to expose the fossil.



But what really sets this museum apart from most fossil exhibitions I've visited is its focus on interpretation and public education. For visitors staying for more than a couple hours, the museum provides a wide variety of hands-on learning programs ranging from fossil casting for kids to guided hikes to a nearby dinosaur quarry. We ran out of time, but I seriously considered joining an excavation clinic where participants learn to extract replica dinosaur bones in a simulated quarry environment.



Taking public education a step further, the museum even offers accredited paleontology courses within the local school district for high school students working towards their graduation. That's miles ahead of typical museums focusing on academic research and exhibition.



Well, even a world class museum is still a museum. The best way to really appreciate Southern Alberta's natural heritage is to walk among the outlandish rock formations of the badlands. Just outside the museum is a short, well-marked interpretive trail taking visitors through the moonscape-like layers of fossil-yielding sedimentary rocks. One word of advice though ... come back an hour before sunset for the most dramatic colors and contrasts. The above picture was taken around noon and does not do any justice to the beauty of badlands scenery at sunset. Just compare the above picture with those taken at Dinosaur Provincial Park at sunset in the next post and you'll be convinced.

Our 2,000 km Drive across the Alberta Prairies

A lazy summer road trip is one of those luxuries rarely allowed for people like myself, one of millions of slaving city folks drowning in daily work in Canada. So when we decided upon a Canadian Rockies trip this past summer, we slowed down to let our eyes, and my camera shutter, fully appreciate a very Canadian landscape that I never had the chance to experience -- the great vastness of the Alberta Prairies.



Oil pumpjacks are undoubtedly one of the integral images coming of Alberta's landscape, but that's gradually changing with biodiesel-producing canola fields spreading across the prairies, and giant wind turbines popping up along the foothills in southern Alberta.



Old-fashioned working ranches still dominate much of the landscape in southwestern Alberta, which remains the centre of the province's beef cattle industry today. A succulent cut of prime rib from Alberta's Black Angus beef is one of my own favorite Canadian dishes.



Another ubiquitous sight during Albertan summers, these gigantic rolls of hay bales typically weight several hundred kilograms each. To many visitors few images better evoke the allure of rural life than an endless ocean of golden hay bales basking under the sun, but here in Canada once in a while we do hear about people being seriously injured or killed by the crushing weight of these bales when not handled properly.



Among the joys of road-tripping are the unexpected discoveries outside of the original itinerary. Due to my own ignorance I had never heard of Fort Macleod prior to stumbling into this movie-set of a town. Situated at the convergence of ancient Blackfoot Indian encampments and the wagon trails of the Canadian Old West, Fort Macleod was once one of the important settlements in southern Alberta back in the 1910's.



Nowadays the historical main street, Colonel Macleod Boulevard, still illustrates the frontier town's former glory through the careful preservation of its sandstone buildings, some dating back to the late 1800's. Built in 1912, the Empress Theatre in the previous picture is Western Canada's oldest continuous operating movie theatre and still features Hollywood's latest flicks on a nightly basis. Pictured here is the now closed Java Shop restaurant, of Brokeback Mountain fame.



"R.G.Mathews Real Estate." The building itself is over a century old, and this Mathews fellow was said to have moved out of the town by 1920. The structure, like most of the old town centre, is protected as a Provincial Historic Area to preserve all the architectural details and signages from early 20th century. This was a pleasant discovery both my wife and I thoroughly enjoyed -- the romantic atmosphere for her, and the photogenic scenery for myself.



But our real reason for driving through Fort Macleod was to visit one of Canada's lesser-known UNESCO World Heritage Sites, an ancient Blackfoot hunting ground known as Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. Over these very cliffs hundreds of thousands of American bisons plunged to their deaths, driven by the ingenious strategies and teamwork of the indigenous hunters. A modern interpretive centre provides the background information for inquisitive visitors, but it's seeing the actual cliffs that completes the haunting experience.



Through our 21st century eyes we may call it animal cruelty, but for the previous thousands of years it was simply the reality of survival. This was the ultimate test of wits between man and nature, with grave consequences for the defeated. A botched hunting season could lead to the decimation of a tribe through the long Canadian winter, which provided incentive for entire societies to dedicated their resources to refine the hunting process to an art form. Traps and decoys would be carefully set up, and actors would cover themselves in animal grease and skin to smell, look and move like wolf packs or bison calves in the eyes of the hunted. In today's terms this was a battle plan that combined a nation's expertise on animal behavior, logistics, meteorology, strategic planning, training and execution. Anyone remotely interested in the history of the First Nations People shouldn't miss this place.



After visiting the somber monument of life-and-death in the prehistorical era, a two-hour-drive to the northwest would transport the visitor to a more romantic time of cowboys and Indians, Mounties and outlaws. The Bar U Ranch National Historic Site is the last remnants of a mighty ranching empire that once boasted tens of thousands of cattles and fed much of Western Canada.



The small number of buildings surviving to this day are exhibited as part of an interpretive program, complete with historical furnishings, hands-on demonstrations, and a horse-drawn carriage ride to transport visitors around the site. The syrupy smell of fresh oven baking permeated the cookhouse in this picture, where a talented staff made cookies and pies for our tasting using hand tools and an antique wood-burning oven and stove.



If you have read this far and are intrigued by some of these sights and experiences, I must say that these were only the little side-trips while we visited the real star attractions of southern Alberta -- Waterton National Park, Dinosaur Provincial Park and Drumheller. Those will be shared in the next several posts.