Drumheller boomed as long as coal was being dug out of the ground, but when that industry collapsed, the Alberta town was able to thrive thanks to another valuable underground resource - dinosaur bones.
Our continued fascination with the giant creatures that ruled the Earth millions of years ago fuels a steady parade of visitors to Alberta’s Badlands.
The two biggest draws for dinosaur lovers is the Royal Tyrell Museum in Drumheller and nearby Dinosaur Provincial Park which provides bones and fossils that make up a large percentage of the museum’s collection.
Visitors to Drumheller will immediately observe dinosaur kitsch everywhere they turn. It seems that every other street corner sports a garishly-painted dinosaur that undoubtedly makes visiting paleontologists cringe at its inaccuracy. They were supposedly salvaged from a dinosaur theme park that went bankrupt years ago.
Lamp posts sport dinosaur decorations, a local supermarket has a dinosaur head bursting out of the wall into the parking lot and then there’s the World’s Largest Dinosaur, a towering Tyrannosaurus Rex of the giant-roadside-attraction school of architecture that is attached to the visitor information centre.
For $3, you can pay for the privilege of climbing up the dinosaur to gaze out of his mouth to view the town and the Badlands beyond. It’s not quite the vista you’d get from the Empire State Building, but it’s hard to resist.
With so much exposure to dinosaur iconography, you have no choice but to visit the Royal Tyrell, but, chances are, if you’ve come to Drumheller that’s what you’re there for. It is arguably one of the world’s great dinosaur museums. In case you’re wondering, the museum’s Royal designation was obtained in 1990 when Queen Elizabeth II visited. The museum gets its name from geologist Joseph Burr Tyrrell who discovered the first dinosaur fossils in the region.
If you are a die-hard dinosaur fan, you could easily spend an entire day exploring the museum’s collection, but even the most casual visitor will spend several hours touring the building‘s many displays.
To enhance your understanding of what you see in the museum, you can sign up for a short, 90-minute hike into the surrounding countryside to learn about how the fossils are extracted from the ground and even look for them yourself.
One thing to be aware of is that Alberta has some of the strictist fossil-collecting laws in the world. If you're from outside Alberta, forget about it. The fossils belong to Alberta and you can be heavily fined or imprisoned if you take home a souvenir. Albertans are allowed to keep fossils collected from the surface that are found on private land, but the specimen remains the property of the province and the individual who found it is considered to be its guardian.
If you enjoy hiking in the Badlands around the Tyrell and want more time to admire its otherworldly scenery, then it’s time to hit the road and head out for a visit to Dinosaur Provincial Park.
The park is a 176-kilometre drive from Drumheller and could be visited as a day trip or you can stay longer by camping in the park or staying in one of several hotels in nearby Brooks. Even if you don’t have camping gear, you can “glamp” in walled tents available in the park with advance reservation.
During my visit, instead of driving the direct highway route, we took the back roads to soak in a bit of the scenery. We were rewarded with the nice view of Dorothy's grain elevator, one of those rapidly disappearing cathedrals of the prairies as well as a solitary pronghorn antelope which took the time to pose for photographs.
One thing to be wary of if using a GPS to navigate to the park is that some devices direct travellers to Steveville, a town on the far northwest side of the park where there are few facilities.
The park itself is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and, despite this honour, is actually a provincial park and not a national one. Another misconception is that it is administered by the Royal Tyrell Museum. It is not, although its scientists do conduct research there. The museum also maintains some of the fossils in the park’s impressive visitor centre which itself was once a field station of the Tyrell which scientists once used as a base of operations.
If you’d like to live the experience of a field researcher, the park offers one, two and three-day programs where you can work with Royal Tyrell researchers to excavate a real bone bed.
For those who are not as adventurous, the park has a wide variety of other tours of varying durations and difficulties that take you into the heart of the park’s desert landscape.
On any of these tours you will soon learn why this place is so rich with fossils. The standing joke is you can’t throw a stone without hitting a dinosaur bone and the stone you throw just may be one of those bones. It’s not far from the truth. At first, I couldn’t see any fossils as a I roamed around the sandy scenery but within 20 minutes of instruction from our expert guide, I was seeing them everywhere.
Even if you don’t have the slightest interest in sauropods, Dinosaur Provincial Park is worth a visit just for the scenery. It’s a glacier-cut valley of desert sand and rock, with hoodoos and hills striated with reds, browns and blacks layered over eons of geologic time. The shapes and colours make it a photographer’s delight, especially at sunrise and sunset as the shadows and colours change from moment to moment. The park even offers a tour for photographers.
The black layers visible in the valley walls are a reminder of the coal that once dominated the area’s economy before the dinosaurs made it famous.
That history is worth exploring once you’ve overdosed on fossils and the best place to do it is in Drumheller’s Atlas Mine, a national historic site that was the region’s last working mine until it shut down in 1979.
Despite the national historic designation, the mine is not administered by Parks Canada, but is instead operated by a volunteer, non-profit historical society which does a tremendous job.
I was impressed by their enthusiasm for the site’s history and their ability to explain it to visitors and to bring the place to life. A visit starts with a trip via coal train to the wash room where miners would suit up before their descent into the mines. You are equipped with a helmet and light and head up to the tipple where coal rocks were sorted and loaded into trains then up the mine opening.
Unfortunately, the mine has been sealed so you cannot go too far into the ground, but the seal is not very deep and the historic society hopes it will be excavated some day so that visitors could see more of the vast network of mine shafts that lay just beyond the fallen rock.
It may not be profitable to mine coal any more, but the site is a reminder that the same geologic forces that made mining possible is the reason Drumheller is rich with fossils and a place that will continue to attract visitors.
On the Web:
Atlas Coal Mine
atlascoalmine.ab.ca
Royal Tyrrell Museum
tyrrellmuseum.com
Dinosaur Provincial Park
albertaparks.ca/dinosaur
Drumheller tourist information
traveldrumheller.com
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