2012/07 Western Canada trip - Dinosaur Provincial |
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Dear All,
At the end of Part Six we had left Grand Teton and Yellowstone, crossed Montana, and were about to enter Canada for the final section of our trip. We had twelve days before John and Edna’s flight took them home to Australia.
Sunday July 15th
I was expecting some problems at the border as I was importing about twice as much as I was allowed and we also had some surplus cans of beer, which John was supposed to have put on his Raisin Bran that morning. The border guard seemed to be happy to share this all out between the three of us and waived us through. I was so surprised that I forgot to surrender my I-94 permit, due to expire the next day. The Americans’ Homeland Security gets really snotty if you overstay your permit, so I’d have to mail it in to them with evidence like Canadian credit card slips to prove that I really did leave the USA on July 15th.
We were heading for Dinosaur provincial park, a really popular spot, often fully booked at weekends but hopefully not on a Sunday evening. The countryside is mainly flat and uninteresting but the weather provided excitement; we had thunderstorms on either side of us and drove for an hour through a grey tunnel of torrential rain. For even more excitement, our GPS had a nervous breakdown. I had a good idea where Dinosaur is, north and east of Brooks, so I was ignoring all of the GPS’ weird suggestions to go south. Eventually though, I needed to find which road to take from Brooks, and the GPS said we were only thirty miles away but with four hours driving ahead of us! The detailed instructions included the classic sequence “drive 45K south, make a U-turn, drive 45K north.” I performed a lobotomy, pulling out chips and battery, and it eventually came to its senses.
After all this we arrived in mid-afternoon and dry weather, with time to do some exploring. The park is in the Badlands of the Red Deer 
River, a big hole in the Alberta prairies. The area is famous for its dinosaur fossils, buried under those prairies and revealed wherever the cliffs of the Badlands are exposed.
As I’d hoped, there were camp sites available on a Sunday night, and we were given a nicely secluded spot. Unfortunately, the campground was 
damp and very buggy; and our site was amazingly buggy. Edna reacts very badly to mosquito bites, so this was bad. She and John were thrashing around trying to kill any that came near them. After living with them for thirty years in Minnesota, I can mostly ignore them, but we all wanted to get away for a bit.
Up at the prairie level, in the wind, there were few bugs, but there’s only so much to see up there. We walked the trails, looking down on at the striped rocks of the Badlands, and trying not to trip over the tiny prickly pear cacti hidden among the grass. There are lots of signs up there too, but eventually we had read all about the stromatoporoids, sponge-like creatures whose skeletons now hold Alberta’s oil and gas deposits, and we had to go down amongst the bugs to learn more about the dinosaurs.
We took the drive around the Badlands and came to the park’s centerpiece, the trail that leads to the quarry where the dinosaurs were excavated. Back a hundred years ago, fossil hunters were taking hundreds of skeletons out of this quarry.
Even in the wind this area was very buggy, and John and Edna were forced to retreat. I didn’t enjoy the trail much; the cloud of mozzies around my head made it hard to read the signs. The Badlands’ clay soil made for a sticky walk, too. Interestingly, the fossil hunters of 1910 
complained of the same problems in their journals.
We returned to hide in the camper on what was now a drizzly evening.
Monday July 16th 
After a night of rain the mozzies still ruled in the morning, so we walked to the visitor centre, which turned out to be the Tyrrell Museum’s field station in the park, with lots of exhibits showing what had been found locally. This included a recreation of the fossil hunters’ field camp, fortunately without the clay or bugs. Tyrell himself had started the whole fossil rush when he came nose to nose with the fossilized skull of an enormous albertosaurus, exposed by erosion.