A Jurassic journey through the Canadian Badlands

Dinosaur Provincial Park is a couple hours' drive outside of Drumheller, the Dinosaur Capital of Canada. It’s worth the trip. The park is the final resting place of so many prehistoric beasties that UNESCO designated it a World Heritage Site. When you approach it, you’ll swear you’re at Alan Grant’s dinosaur dig from Jurassic Park. The surrounding Badlands stand out in all their glory as you wander around the park filled with more than 150 fully intact fossilized skeletons that have been unearthed and preserved. The entire Badlands, back in prehistoric times at least, was a hot, steamy jungle crawling with cyclopean reptiles, but a few hundred million years' worth of climate change has left us with the starkly beautiful badlands we see today. And it’s a good thing too, as the climate, dryness and other ecological factors all contributed to the fossils’ amazing preservation. Bring the kids along, obviously, since 58 dinosaur species were discovered right there in the park, and who knows if your child will be the one to discover the 59th? Seriously, tourists often literally stumble across new fossils all the time!

What is a coulee? They're actually big, spherical balls of rock that will probably make you believe in aliens or in a man-eating giant version of a snowball fight, but with sandstone. Red Rock Coulee Natural Area is a sight to behold, with acres and acres of these large oddly spherical rock formations spanning the horizon. And coulee isn’t the only neat word you get to use there to describe the unusual topography... there are also hoodoo formations, huge jutting rock columns, each one showing off the geological history of the world with each layer and ‘ring’ of concreted sediment. Some of the coulees are as wide around as a man is tall, and are considered the largest in the world.

Before the advent of horses in North America, native peoples like the Blackfoot had one surefire way of hunting the mighty buffalo of the plains. They would startle a grazing herd of the great beasts and cause something of a stampede, then guide the herd towards a cliff, and the momentum of the chaos would cause dozens of buffalo to fall to their deaths. The entire hunt was carefully orchestrated, incredibly daring and highly ritualistic and spiritual. The Head-Smashed-In Buffalo jump (named for one hapless brave who wanted to see the spectacle of falling buffalo from directly below) is the third and last UNESCO World Heritage Site on this trip. Everything is perfectly preserved from pre-Columbian times, from the ‘drive lanes’ the Buffalo Runners would usher their quarries into, demarked by standing cairns, to the kilometre-long cliff wall itself. The park is a great place to bring the family if you enjoy the outdoors or museums and want to immerse yourself in a thrilling chapter of native life on the plains of Alberta.

The Smashed-In-Head Buffalo Jump is also home to a great museum, The Interpretive Centre and Museum, which preserves the rich Blackfoot culture, the patron of which, Joe Crow Shoe Sr, has a lodge named after him. He dedicated his life to fostering understanding between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples. The museum opened in 1987 and is built directly into the cliff face of the Buffalo Jump. Here you can see traditional rituals including dancing and drumming and learn how the First Nations peoples used to build their homes and fashion tools and clothing out of the sacred buffalo they would hunt. Be sure to catch the “Lost Identities: A Journey of Rediscovery” exhibit featuring photographs of Aboriginal communities, that until recently, were mysteries with their meanings and subjects unknown.