Canada's (Almost) Unknown World Heritage Site

This page is dedicated to what I feel is one of Western Canada's most underrated destinations.

In my mind it ranks among little-known gems like Gokayama and Telc -- world-class destinations in their own unique ways, yet somehow remain under the radar of 99.9% of tourists.



Unlike most obscure and unheard-of destinations, this place is not entirely unknown (being a UNESCO World Heritage Site) or inaccessible (being only 2.5 hours from Calgary). So how does Dinosaur Provincial Park still manage to remain undiscovered by the masses?



First, most foreign tourists, and even Canadian tourist outside of Alberta, have never heard of Dinosaur Provincial Park despite accolades from UNESCO.

Second, even though most Albertans have heard of it, only a fraction would actually visit.

Among those who visit, even fewer would stay for the magnificent sunset that brings the best out of the amazing landscape.

Finally, among those who do stay for the sunset, few would get inside the restricted areas of the Park where the most stunning views are exposed.

You get the idea.



For us this is one of our favorite memories of Alberta, if not of the entire Western Canada. And I hope that after reading this article, you too will appreciate the unique charm of this region and add this to your trip of Western Canada.



For two-and-a-half magical hours we were guided into the restricted areas of Dinosaur Provincial Park, containing some of the world's greatest concentration of dinosaur fossils, to quietly enjoy a spectacular sunset in the surroundings of the most extraordinary Badlands landscape.



Many of our favorite photos of our Canadian Rockies and Prairies road-trip came out of this small-group tour organized by the Provincial Park. Aptly named the "Sunset Tour," this short trek started in the final hours of summertime daylight when the warm colors of the sun intensified the dramatic beauty of the Badlands' sandstone formations.



I can find no words to satisfactorily describe the stunning, raw beauty of one of the most dramatic Canadian landscapes. The setting sun lent its warm, orange palette to these ancient sandstones while casting long slivers of dark shadows upon the rocks, underneath which thousands of once-terrifying reptiles sleep in permanent tranquility. Only a handful places like this can be found anywhere in the world, and this is likely the most accessible.



The tour is typically run from 19:00 to 21:00, though our enthusiastic guide volunteered to lengthen the tour, to everyone's delight, to give us more time to photograph and soak up the atmosphere of the sunset over a strangely romantic landscape.



Something with the appearance of a dead tree-trunk caught the eyes of my wife, who brought it to the attention of our interpretive guide. Well it's dead for sure, but it wasn't a tree-trunk.



It turned out to be a fossilized dinosaur leg bone, as explained by our guide. After a short lesson on fossil identification and understanding what we've been treading upon, it was almost impossible not to step on fossil fragments for the rest of the tour. It is this amazing concentration of Cretaceous reptilian fossils that led to the park's inclusion as a World Heritage Site.



This was the moment we all eagerly waited for, and at the same time wished that time would stand still for us. The sun descended beyond the prairie horizon under a brilliant canopy of blood red. This was our own favorite sunset, which we found to be no less spectacular than the famous sunset at Oia village in Santorini, widely considered to be one of the world's best. And the romance in the air would become even more climactic ...



A full moon started rising above the rock spires over the eastern night sky, at the same time that the sun flirted with the western horizon. Nobody spoke a word -- there was only the awed silence, with the occasional howl of coyotes far in the background.



The planned 21:00 end to our tour stretched to 21:45, largely due to our accommodating guide who voluntarily gave up her own time to show us more of the park's incredible scenery. On the way back we even stopped again for one more photo of wildflowers swaying under the moonlight. Thanks Cory for the great tour!



The Sunset tour can be booked online at the Dinosaur Provincial Park's official website, at the cost of CAD$25 as of 2010. If you're planning a visit to the Canadian Rockies (ie.Banff), combining these beautiful Badlands with the magnificence of the Canadian Rockies would make a an excellent trip to cherish for years. The Dinosaur Provincial Park is located near Brooks, only a 3.5-hour-drive from Banff and is an excellent overnight trip from Banff or Calgary.

A day-trip from Banff or Calgary is not recommended, as you'll want to wait for the warm, golden lighting of the sunset upon the Badlands' dramatic landscape. That means you may want a place nearby to stay for the night ...


ACCOMMODATIONS AROUND DINOSAUR PROVINCIAL PARK

Several options exist when it comes to accommodations around Dinosaur Provincial Park.

CAMPING INSIDE THE PROVINCIAL PARK
The provincial park has a large number of campsite spaces, which are rarely fully booked aside from public holidays (eg. Canada Day long weekend, Labour Day long weekend etc). Spaces can also be booked ahead of time at the park's official website.


STAYING IN THE CITY OF BROOKS
The nearest town is Brooks, a 40-minute drive to the southwest of the park. The main drag (2nd Street West) has a few chain hotels (Best Western, Holiday Inn) that tend to overcharge about $150 for a double room during the summer peak season.


A 96-YEAR-OLD HOTEL HIDDEN INSIDE THE VILLAGE OF PATRICIA
This is probably the first photographed review of Patricia Hotel anywhere on the web -- I've searched everywhere online prior to our trip and couldn't find anything.


The village of Patricia is the closest thing to a proper community in the vicinity of Dinosaur Provincial Park, just a 10-minute drive to the southwest. Boasting a grand total of 2 streets, this little hamlet has just one commercial establishment that multitasks as a greasy-spoon cafe during breakfast, the local retiree's hangout in the mid-day heat, a watering hole after a day's hard work on the farm (the pub is even named the "Water Hole"), and at night transforms into a rustic hotel for the odd traveler passing by.



Dating from 1915, the hotel is said to be the oldest remaining structure of a once-thriving farming and ranching community. Back in the early 1900's Patricia was an important stop along the old wagon trail connecting to Calgary, but was relegated to obscurity when horse-drawn wagons gave way to the Canadian Pacific Railway built 20km to the south. The newly incorporated town of Brooks quickly became the region's urban centre, while Patricia diminished to an anonymous hamlet at the edge of the Badlands.



How do we know all this? Well it's all according to an older gentleman we met there at breakfast, who is probably as good a source of information as any. I'm not sure if there's anything such as a town archive to keep records for this village of perhaps 50 permanent residents.



While the hotel doesn't look quite 90+ years old, the first floor is a genuine western bar dating from at least the 1950's. One corner of the tavern features an old-fashioned "steak pit" where the locals gather for a grill-your-own-steak dinner at the barbecue. During the pheasant hunting season the tavern is also home to the local hunter's association, and award plaques on the wall immortalize the valiance of the village's greatest hunters. One of which reads:

PPH&MD Rubber Ducky Awards

YEAR 2002. Recipient Jordan Given.

Accidental discharge of firearm while racing after his dog. On a further confession was guilty of spray painting his dog with a different kind of discharge brought on by over indulgence at Joe's bar the previous evening.

That's pure Canadian humour ... an old-fashioned western pub just can't get much more authentic than that.



As of summer 2010 the rooms still retained a lot of old-fashioned western decor from the 1950's. No air-con, but the sheets and the en-suite bathroom were very clean. Its peak summer season rate of CAD$66 was the best deal we found on our 15-day trip across Alberta.

RECENT UPDATE: It seems that Patricia Hotel is finally dipping its toes into the Internet era with a new official website. No email address given yet -- hopefully that will come in time.

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.

Banff's Spectacular Sub-Alpine Meadows

After reviewing 1,500 pictures taken in the Canadian Rockies, this emerged as my personal favorite.

Now this place is certainly not world famous like Lake Louise, or a Canadian favorite like Moraine Lake, or possess the eye-catching turquoise blue of Peyto Lake. To me this is a breathtaking location that strikes the right balance between the spectacular beauty that everyone expects of the Canadian Rockies, with the ruggedness and hidden power of nature that can catch anyone by surprise.



Where's this place? It is a sub-alpine plateau of 2,200m elevation, an enchanted kingdom of 360-degree panoramas, summer wildflowers and wildlife, yet easily accessible through a shuttle bus service.

While locals rate it as one of the best hiking grounds near Banff, it seems to have remained under the radar of most visitors. Some tourists are deterred by the lack of public road access, but richly rewarded are those willing to pay for the privilege of arriving at some of the most photogenic alpine scenery anywhere.



This mountain-top is known locally by two names, depending on the time of year. From November through early May, cable gondolas whisk skiers and snowboarders to the Canadian Rockies' largest ski resort known as Sunshine Village. But from mid-June to late September, gondolas give way to a shuttle bus and the mountain transforms into a hiker's wonderland known as Sunshine Meadows.



10 metres of annual snowfall melts away in the early summer, revealing a well-maintained network of trails and footpaths that wind past lush green meadows and emerald-colored lakes. Hiking season is short and dramatic, beginning with residual snow in June, an explosion of wildflowers in July and August, and the brilliance of Autumn foliage in September.



There are two ways of getting to Sunshine Meadows -- either hike uphill for 2 hours from the base of the winter gondola, or take a 15 minute shuttle bus ride. Regular price for the shuttle bus is $26, but at the time of writing you can apply for a free Travel Alberta Card prior to your trip and get a 15% discount by simply flashing your card.



Wild creatures large and small inhabit this pristine plateau. Not only is the meadows known to be one of the prime grizzly bear habitats in Banff National Park, the entire mountain seems to be a giant colony of hundreds of thousands of ground squirrels. This one in particular wanted to make friends with my water bottle.



It was also the beginning of wildflower season when we visited in mid-July, with fascinating alpine flowers of every color springing from the snow-irrigated wetlands along the trails. Bright red Indian Paintbrushes and bushy Western Anemones were most prominent during our visit in mid-July.



If you can time your visit in August, Sunshine Meadows organizes a Wildflower Week every year with guided interpretive hikes and photography workshops. Even if you can't, the brilliant hues of alpine lichens and a plethora of wildflowers are there to guide you along the trails all summer.



The main trails range from easy to moderate in difficulty, and a trail map can be downloaded from the official site. We rode the 11:00 bus to the Nature Centre at the top, took the Rock Isle Trail to the Rock Isle Viewpoint for a picnic around noon, hiked up to the Standish Viewpoint after lunch, then looped around the lakes on the Garden Path Trail before returning to the Nature Centre in time for the 16:30 bus down the mountain.

This easy 10km hike was certainly our most memorable in the Canadian Rockies, though the more adventurous may prefer to use Sunshine Meadows as a launching point for serious hikes along the Continental Divide. Regardless of your fitness level, just remember to bring your camera -- it's just impossible not to come home with satisfying pictures.