Drumheller, Alberta

We took a detour eastward after Banff because we heard the badlands around Drumheller, Alberta were worth checking out. This proved to be the case! They were definitely not something I expected to see in the middle of the prairies.

It was a 3-hour drive from Lake Louis through the Rocky Mountains and pure prairie before a rusty canyon suddenly opened and we found the town nestled within. It was quite surreal given the seemingly endless flatlands of yellow we had just cut through.

I found a local brewery and that seemed a fine enough jumping point to check out the town before heading to what would hopefully be our free parking spot for the night.

Drumheller, once a hotbed for coal mining decades ago, now hangs its hat on the treasure trove of fossils found in the canyons of the region--hence the dinosaur statues everywhere, and the alternative names for every street in town (Stegosaurus Lane is also known lamely as 5th Avenue, or some such).

The inner child thought this was all pretty cool, so we explored the town further.

Drumheller boasts the largest dinosaur statue in the world as well as a world class dino museum. From this angle it looks like T-Rex is terrorizing the town. 

It was all pretty fun for an afternoon, but we needed to go check out our potential resting place before sunset to make sure it would actually be accommodating. It turned out to be one of the best boondocking sites we've been to.

The site overlooked Horsethief Canyon, the smaller of the two major canyons in the area. Supposedly cattlewranglers back in the day often saw seemingly lost horses emerge from the canyon rebranded, hence the name.

It's a cool place. This is where our Kodiak was parked. Worth mentioning it was a high of 31C that day.

There were two oddly placed signs lauding the since-discredited benefits of canola oil. Presumably somewhere in the region there are canola fields, but clearly not here.

That evening we parked our camp chairs and had a few beer as we watched the sunset. There were three other people here the entire evening.

It was another fine place to have a beer. We've found a few of those.

It was so quiet that night, I may have slept the best since Blind River.

The next morning the sun rose over wheat fields and a small oil drill.

Kenting played some fetch...

And then we explored the canyon a bit.

We returned to the plateau above and played more ball, but the game ended, sadly, with the ball falling into a prairie dog hole.

We couldn't get it out, but Kenting was unwilling to leave it behind.

I had to put my foot down because it was time to see some hoodoos (which are apparently a type of rock formation caused by wind and water that look like big mushrooms--I had no idea).

We then moved on to Horseshoe Canyon, the bigger of the canyons in this part of the Red Deer River Valley.

Drumheller was cool. We could've stayed another night without question, but the road beckoned and we decided to head to the nearby Beiseker an hour away to get a head start westward.

The municipal campsite there was good enough. Quiet, cheap, and a chance to refill the water tankbottles and empty our waste. The leaves were telling us it was almost fall despite the unreasonable warmth. We drove on to BC the next morning.