Drum the Hell Out of It.

The Badlands are just over an hour outside of Calgary and, sadly, an afterthought to many tourists. We (I) wanted the best lighting across the desert geology and left very early from Calgary on a Monday morning. Racing along the highway I was in agony missing this sunrise which I snapped addictively from the rental car as cold morning air blew in my face and large semi-trucks raced ahead.

We were heading to a town called Drumheller. The name alone reflects the harshness of a town in a valley surrounded by flat topped dry hills. It is an old coal mining town. 139 mines were registered between 1911 and 1979 and there is a coal mining museum that tells the hard story.  We did not stop to visit the museum and the last mining site although it has been designated a national historic site in Canada.

People here are solid and probably conservative.  The Passion Play which is held every year is currently a claim to fame and draws people for hundreds of miles.

Drumheller is also known as Dinosaur valley because some important fossils have been found and the town has a claim to having the "largest dinosaur statue" in the world...which hadn't been on my bucket list to see, but now is (was).  There is a stunning modern paleontology museum which was closed on Mondays to us and so we missed that interpretation of this exceptional area.  If you are curious please go here for some fun.


Just north of here is another town called Hanna where the group Nickelback originated  (I will leave you to do your detective work to figure out where the name came from...you couch potatoes already know.)  There is something so totally talented and in abundance in the music gene pool of Canadians.  I like this group (Nickelback) , but not necessarily their evolutionary change in music as they move out of the valley.


Anyway, we did meet a few interesting town 'folks' of that solid small-town ilk which I will include in the next post.