Alberta’s Abundant Attractions

Story and photography by
Nancy & Eric Anderson 

 

Each year Alberta expects that more than 1,250,000 visitors will flock into Calgary for its famous Stampede. After that, most tourists will wander around this pretty city of almost 1million inhabitants marveling at its modern architecture, admiring its urban neatness, and noting, as is true in many Canadian cities, the absence of crime, graffiti and even street people. Then the majority of people will head back home feeling they've had the complete Alberta experience.

More's the pity because there's a lot going on in Alberta that you really have to seek out -- it sure doesn't come looking for you. Alberta is a bit like Texas and not just because the city's fortunes fluctuate with the price of oil, but because distances can be demanding if you want to see anything special outside the Stampede city.

All three main attractions beyond Calgary are a good three to four hours round trip, but well worth the visit. Two have been developed in the last 30 years, the third is as old as the hills, indeed is the hills, if you dare to use that word for the Canadian Rockies themselves.

Royal Tyrrell Museum

The tiny township of Drumheller lies one and a half hours by automobile northeast of Calgary.

About 70,000,000 years ago the whole area was inland sea, swamp and coastal plain. The vegetation was lush -- hog heaven for dinosaurs and "there were plenty of them," said Lynne Thornton, a consultant for the Royal Tyrrell Museum, "that's why this is the richest dinosaur bone bank in the world." Asked why so many she answered, "Because, for the dinosaurs, it was like Palm Springs -- easy livin'."

Maybe dinosaurs died herds at a time when a meteor created a nuclear winter; maybe there were floods and tidal waves that drowned huge number all at once; maybe it just got colder and the pea brains couldn't adapt. But whatever happened the evidence lies all around Alberta, exposed by glacier action: bones on top of bones in fossil banks not unlike the elephant graveyards of Africa.

Ten thousand to 13 thousand years ago when the Great Ice Age melted, huge deposits of something else were found exposed in the deep trenches torn out of the prairies. It was coal -- in some of the richest seams in the world. Little Drumheller grew up around a coal mine in 1910 and might still be a thriving mining community if oil and gas hadn't become more important discoveries in Alberta and if the locomotive steam engine hadn't been replaced by the diesel.

The area became an economic disaster. That's when the Alberta government remembered that Joseph Burr Tyrrell, the young geologist who had found the extensive deposits of coal in June 1884, had also discovered those first dinosaur bones, the ones that started the Great Canadian Rush the same year. The Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology opened in 1986 to international artistic acclaim. Six hundred thousand tourists came from nowhere the first year to walk its nature trails, its indoor science gardens and its never-ending galleries with the largest number of dinosaur specimens on display in the world -- more than 200. In fact, the Museum's collection of specimens now numbers more than 60,000 items, many found in the Museum's fuel station situated in Dinosaur Provincial Park, 60 miles to the Southeast.

"Usually our paleontologists are all out in the field," said Thornton, "and if you're looking for them they can be as hard to find as dinosaur bones."

Just the week before our visit, Drumheller researchers had, unbelievably, found seven dinosaur nests full of fossilized eggs; only the second such find in history. Nevertheless, the scholarly atmosphere behind the scenes at the Museum contrast with this excitement building up in the field. In the laboratories the technicians bend over fossils, painstakingly preparing them for display. Around the bones lie art supplies, air brushes and, of all things, empty cartons meant for Chinese food. Those small boxes turn out to be the best containers for the chemicals used in cleaning specimens but they are odd 21st century items to be in proximity to 70,000,000-year-old bones.

"That's what killed off the dinosaurs," said Gilles Danis, then the head technician, moving his hand over his fossil tables, "they ate too much take-out Chinese food." The Gary Larson cartoon above his desk challenges that statement. It shows a herd of dinosaurs smoking cigarettes, the true cause of their demise.

Questioned whether the age of dinosaurs really ended suddenly, Danis shook his head. "It's starting to look like not only did dinosaurs die more gradually but some may not have died at all," he says. "Some forms of dinosaur became very successful and prevalent. We still have them today. They fly around all the time. We take pictures. We watch them. We call them birds."

Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump

It's hard to stand in the Dinosaur Badlands of Drumheller and really imagine those beasts -- the true giants of history -- roaming the Red Deer River valley before you. It's easier by far to bestraddle the rocky face of Head-Smashed-In near Ft. MacLeod about two hours south of Calgary and picture the scene there when Plains Indians in their constant search for food stampeded herds of terrified buffalo over the cliff to a sudden death 55 feet below.

The North American Indian depended heavily on the buffalo for food, clothing and the very necessities of life. The bones and horns were used for sewing needles and tools, the tendons and strips of leather for thread and card, the bladder and lengths of intestines for utensils and containers, the hides for teepee covers and robes and even the buffalo dung, cleaned and dried from the colon, as a fuel for warmth and light.

Nothing was wasted.

One purpose of Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump Interpretive Centre is to demonstrate the special association between Indian and buffalo, a relationship so deep it figures in just about every Indian culture. A popular myth the Centre corrects is of the Plains Indians galloping on horseback for many centuries, firing showers of arrows at running buffalo, even brandishing guns and bringing down the great creatures one at a time.

In fact, nomadic Indian braves would follow hairs of grazing buffalo for weeks, then set up extremely methodical attempts to drive them off any local cliffs where the rest of the tribe could wait to harvest the results.

"Another misconception about the Indians we need to clarify," said Chris Williams, the erudite London-trained project manager, standing on the cliff face and talking to a small group of tourists, "is that these guys were naked savages living in caves before the whites came. It's just not true. Long before the Pyramids or Stonehenge these peoples had a highly organized and a highly efficient society -- and a damned good lifestyle."

The methods used by the Indians to run the buffalo off the cliff date back to 5,600 B.C. but probably are even older. The rubble at the base of the cliff is an archaeologist's dream -- a veritable time sandwich of buffalo bones, in some places 35 feet deep, sprinkled with enough Indian artifacts to suggest how each succeeding nation lived, from the most recent, the Blackfoot, who used the jump from about 1700 to 1830 A.D., to the Mummy Cave culture who lived there about 3700 B.C.

Indian folk stories remind us that food supply was wealth. Pemmican pounded from dried meat, marrow fat and chokeberries and sewn into air-tight lengths of buffalo intestine could travel well and be used as barter for obsidian in distant Wyoming and even, legends say, become currency as far South as the Aztec and Inca civilizations themselves.

"It's easy for historians like myself to overdo our thoughts that the Indians had a 'In Touch With the Rhythms of the Earth Syndrome,'" said Williams, "yet their limited numbers and nomadic lifestyle did enable them to maintain a balanced ecology and avoid polluting the land. Additionally, the amazingly-complex social order that allowed them to hunt the buffalo on foot also created, as is true in any successful civilization, enough free time that they could engage in activities like spirituality and music-at a time when the people in my country, Britain, were barbarians running around painted in woad."

Canadian Rockies

Banff, the largest and oldest town in Canada's mountain park lands, lies 80 miles west of Calgary on the trans-Canada highway. It sits as the gateway to the highlands. Beyond it the road continues on northwest through the Banff and Jasper National Parks, and some of the most splendid scenery on the American continents. Banff National Park alone has about two dozen peaks over 10,000 feet in height. Each mountain you come to seems more inspiring than the last one. Castle Mountain, for example, 70,000,000 years old, a craggy and brooding peak, dominates the Bow River wandering below it. MacKenzie King, the Canadian premier, was once so impressed by the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in World War II that he wanted to rename the peak, Mt. Eisenhower. Sent a photograph of the mountain, the United States President remarked, "It sure looks like me -- old and bald, " but he was unable to attend the dedication ceremony and the name never caught on.

Many of the mountains actually owe their names to a young Scottish physician, Dr. James Hector. A keen amateur geologist, he served with the 1857 Palliser Expedition, a survey sent out to find whether roads and railways really could be constructed across the Great Divide. The group had trouble fulfilling its mission until Hector came across a group of Indians seriously ill with dysentery. He stayed with them until they were well. They saw their benefactor as a god and showed him passes in the remote terrain that no white man had ever seen before. Today's maps indicate many Hector discoveries: Castle Mountain, Vermillion Pass and even his contribution to the name Kicking Horse Pass -- its the spot where his horse kicked him unconscious for several hours at a time when he was searching for game for his starving expedition.

Those days seem far off now. Today, for example, the coyotes are a threat only when they steal golf balls from the fairways, and some say that at the start of the hunting season the elk living on the periphery of the national parks run into them for protection. "We think elk talk to each other," said a guide with a smile. "By the way, if you're trying to find elk around here, just search the golf courses for cows with tassels on their head. If you're looking for mountain goats up high, just watch for patches of snow that move. Just don't go looking for grizzlies -- and remember when you're driving on this highway bear have the right-of-way, even if they're not crossing from right to left."

You can expect to see the wildlife. It can be photographed all around you, scampering over the highway cuttings and peeping out from the lodge pole pines. And you'll be relieved to find out when you get home that the eerie milky turquoise of the Canadian lakes reproduces the same strange luminous way in your colored pictures. The unique blueness of the glacier lakes is due to the glacier sediment they contain -- tiny particles of crystalline rock like confectionery sugar which reflect the short wave length of the spectrum, namely blue.

Strangely, you can't always expect to get a good look at the mountains because this green land gets a lot of rain, and if the clouds come down low you won't see the mountains' magnificent mantles of glacier ice. If so, hang around until the weather improves. The mountains are the reason for coming to Banff -- and have been for more than a hundred years.

John Whyte, a local historian, recalled those days when suddenly the Canadian Rockies started to get busy. "It was the heyday of Victorian ambition," he saids. "The peaks' hitherto silent barrier suddenly became a playground in which climbers, hunters, painters, photographers and writers scrambled in a madcap game of 'King of the Castle' played upon summits of spectacular beauty."