Royal Tyrrell and a Hoodoo Field

My cousin BA, Aunt Wanda and I scooted over to Strathmore from Calgary and picked up two more cousins, Mike and Wanda and Wanda’s boyfriend Dave, for our excursion to Drumheller. 

All except Aunt Wanda and I are longtime Albertans but most of them had never been to the Royal Tyrrell Museum, Canada’s foremost museum dedicated to dinosaur finds. The small city of Drumheller takes the dinosaur theme to the extreme. Gas stations, hotels, parking lots all feature dino-inspired names and big purple or turquoise replicas of the ancient creatures. But it’s the museum you want to see and it’s well worth the trip. Skeletons are made up of a portion of real bones with the rest fabricated to complete the T-Rex or stegosaurus or what have you.

T-Rex skeleton looming large and ferocious

I would recommend visiting Royal Tyrrell in the off-season, in other words, during the day through the school year. Even if you encounter a classroom’s worth of kids you won’t likely have to negotiate around thousands of them and their protective parents pushing the biggest strollers I’ve ever seen. Imagine the Hummer of strollers. That’s what parents are trying to drive through museums these days!

But I digress.

The museum gives you a window into the paleontology lab and a real paleontologist sits outside the lab, taking questions from inquisitive minds, big and small.  It’s a highly interactive, entertaining and educational experience.

two children standing beside connected bones showing the height of T-Rex legs at more than 12 feet high

After the museum we decided to go look for the hoodoo field. A hoodoo is a spire of rock that has a cap or top of a harder rock formation. They’re found in badlands and deserts they can be as high as ten stories. While the hoodoo will continue to get slimmer, the cap protects it from the weather on top. They’re really cool!

a group of hoodoos all about 10 or 12 feet tall.

Hoodoos can vary in colour depending on the minerals in them. This hoodoo stop allowed visitors to touch a few of them and feel the difference in the weight of the rocks and how porous the bottom is compared to the top.

another collection of shorter hoodoos

We made several more stops on this laughter-filled trip including at The Last Chance Saloon in a little village called Wayne, population 26. We also wobbled our way across a legendary suspension bridge at the site of an old coal mine.

long view down the walkway of a steel suspension bridge over the Bow River

At the end of this long day I felt lucky.  Not just to have seen so much in one day but to have done it with people I’ve loved all my life (except Dave who I just met!) and that we all still want to hang out together. What a great day!