Dinosaur Country

Back in July in the original posting of our roadtrip to Calgary, Alberta, I had explained that I was having the photographs scanned and corrected and that I would be posting them along with a short description as they became available..

 - Horseshoe Canyon, Near Drum Heller, AB, 2010.

This shot was from the second last day we were on the road and the first day we had had rain. After much discussion (and persuasion on my part) the night before we decided that we would drive the 140 Km road to visit the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drum Heller "The Dinosaur Capital of the World" East of Calgary (the opposite direction of Vancouver, our destination). Nothing was going our way, at 6 AM, cold, dreary and raining heavily. With sleepy eyes we packed the car in the predawn light only to that find half way there the government had deemed the road unfit for use and had ripped out about twenty kilometers of tar for replacement exposing bumby bare earth as our highway to "paleontologic delight". We pushed through the muddy to terrain and made our way toward the town of about 8200 residents. On the way we spotted a sign marked "Horseshoe Canyon" so we pulled off the main road and made our way along a short dirt path which opened up into a view point of a section of the Canadian Badlands which due the geographic history of glacial movement and unique erosion patterns have yielded countless rare dinosaur fossil finds as well as the occasional coal deposit. We took our time and stood in the rain a few moments admiring the beautiful terrain, I kept on imagining what it must have been like seventy million years ago.. a hulking Albertosaurus chasing after some smaller prey through the dense brush.. or possibly the lively sea floor of a prehistoric ocean. It was cool. 

The End.