aLBERTA’S BADLANDS

TRANSCRIPT

In October of 2022, I flew into Alberta for a whirlwind trip - far too short to explore a province where you can hike endless prairies in the morning, crawl over sculpted badlands in the afternoon and climb a mountain in the evening.

So today, we’re going to zero in on and explore just one of those striking landscapes.

The sun hasn’t yet risen and we’re headed out from the little town of Brooks to a very particular spot about 35km away.

It’s a parking lot at the edge of a drop-off. Across that drop-off should soon be a dramatic sunrise on a stunning vista but is in fact, at present, a wall of fog. 

And as the howls of coyotes rise up and the fog stays stubborn and thick, I start to think this whole morning is going to be a dull grey wash.

But that’s when, like a perfect showman, the sun starts to crest the horizon, burns off the fog, and pulls back the curtain on this.

Dinosaur Provincial Park. In the heart of the Canadian Badlands. It’s some of the most beautiful and otherworldly terrain in the country. Sharply stratified rock carved into canyons, peaks, hoodoos and every kind of curving, flowing feature in between.

90,000 square kilometers of it. An area bigger than Portugal.

And seeing it drop away like this from the flat expanse of prairies really makes you wonder: why is it here? How did Alberta end up with this bizarre, self-contained geology? Well - it wasn’t easy. The process that gave birth to the Badlands began 75 million years ago…

Back then, North America is a very different place. In fact, it’s two places. Laramidia and Appalachia, split by the Western Interior Seaway. And Alberta is either submerged, or covered in tropical forests.

As they flow down from the prehistoric rockies, mountain streams and rivers pull sediments along with them until they converge on the shores of the seaway. Here, the future site of the Badlands, they deposit those sediments, layer by layer by layer, over millions of years.

So that tells us where all this gorgeous stratification came from. But it’s one thing to build all those layers up. It’ll take a very different world to carve them back down. One that existed 13,000 years ago. 

The sweltering Cretaceous tropics are now the great Laurentide Ice Sheet, covering Canada with ice up to 3.2 kilometres thick.

But the ice age is coming to an end. That massive reservoir is starting to warm up. The torrent of meltwater it releases will reshape Canada from coast to coast, including here in Alberta where it’ll cut a deep basin into those soft layers of sedimentary rock laid down millions of years earlier, carving the valleys and canyons of the Badlands up to 80m deep.

And after that initial, dramatic exposure of the sedimentary layers at the end of the last ice age, more subtle erosion from rain, wind and flowing water has continued to carve the badlands into their current form, leaving us with constantly evolving geological features.

And the basin carved 13,000 years ago remains a waterway to this day. Fed by snowmelt and still a little bit of glacial runoff, it’s now the path of the Red Deer River.

So - we know why they’re here? Now - why did they get slapped with the label ‘badlands’?

Well, put yourself in the leather shoes of a French explorer as they forged west in the 1700s. You’ve grown used to the relative easy-going of the rolling prairies when all of a sudden you have to cross this: a maze of steep mesas, valleys, canyons and sinkholes built of unstable mudstone and sandstone. And expanses of particularly nasty ‘popcorn rock’ which is viciously sharp when dry and melts into mud as slippery as ice when wet.

Winters are freezing and windy. Summers are searing and dry. Most fresh water sources are… mostly mud.

Not a surprise those early French explorers declared them ‘les mauvais terres a traverser’ - ‘bad lands to cross’. They often get credit for the name we still use today.

But they’d actually just cribbed the name from the Lakota, who’s territory in what is now the midwestern United States included a ton of badlands. For thousands of years they’d called them ‘Mako Sica’, literally ‘land bad’. 

And that bad land is just as challenging for any flora and fauna willing to brave them. They’re not technically a desert, but they’re among the closest Canada gets to one.

And they share a lot of species adapted for that extreme environment. Sage and cacti cling to the barren ground. Rattlesnakes and scorpions eke out survival from meagre resources.

There is one vibrant exception, though: the narrow riparian zone along the banks of the few permanent rivers and streams. It’s as though the full contingent of badlands life has bunched into these tiny but hyper-productive areas.

Crowded plants provides shelter and food for 165 species of birds. And grazing space for mule deer. They handle the often barren territory by eating absolutely everything - a recorded 788 species of plants.

Life hangs onto the badlands in the fringes and by way of extreme specialization. That, along with the stark beauty of the terrain, would already make them a destination. But to leave it there would be ignoring the Albertasaurus in the room. 

Because in fact, you could say the whole area is absolutely teeming with wildlife - provided you gloss over that it’s been dead for 75 million years.

For centuries, the Blackfoot Confederacy have told a story about a very special stone. It’s said this stone calls out to you with the chirp of a bird or a sweet song.

They could have intricate patterns, beautiful metallic shine, and very specific shapes. They called them Iniskim. Buffalo stones, because some naturally look like a carved buffalo.

The nomadic Blackfoot were inextricably connected with the buffalo. Their lives followed the movement of buffalo herds across the plains. And this stone was said to bestow the bearer with power over them. Legend says the first iniskim saved a Blackfoot clan from starvation by calling the buffalo herds back.

Buffalo stones’ unique shapes, patterns and shine are because they’re segments of fossilized ammonites, wide-ranging and diverse creatures who lived in late cretaceous seas. And the Blackfoot kept finding them because the conditions that gave birth to the badlands were also absolutely perfect for creating fossils.

Let’s rewind to the late Cretaceous again, 75 million years ago. When Alberta was half underwater and half tropical forest. As rivers flowed from the mountains to the seas, they would often carry the bodies of dead animals with them. At the mouth of the river, continuous sediment deposits would quickly bury and preserve those bodies - along with the shells of sea creatures like ammonites, allowing them to be fossilized. 

That enormous treasure trove of fossils lay dormant until the glacial runoff at the end of the last ice age washed away the surface layers and revealed them for the first time. They were there when the Blackfoot arrived, and served as iniskim for centuries.

Modern paleontology in Alberta only begins in 1884. That’s when Joseph Tyrell is exploring the badlands region by boat. He starts to notice bones sticking out of the cliffs, followed by an entire skull. Eventually the creature it belonged to would be fittingly named Albertasaurus. The first dinosaur discovered here - but far from the last.

Since then the badlands have revealed themselves to be one of the richest fossil beds in the world. 58 species of dinosaur and counting. The Tyrell museum in Drumheller now has more than 160,000 specimens in their collection and so many coming in all the time that they have a 45-year backlog.

For palaeontologists, this place is a gift that keeps on giving. The constant erosion reveals new discoveries every year. Close to 70% of the park is still restricted to the public to keep it pristine for their work. 

New species are still being discovered - including another in 2017 that was given the provincial mantle: Albertavenator Curriei. There are drawings of him out there that are more detailed, but none more adorable.

And in 2022, a field school volunteer came upon the remains of a hadrosaur with its skin intact, an incredibly rare find.

At a glance, yes, the badlands live up to their name - inhospitable and unwelcoming.

But for a place that can feel so dead, it is alive in so many ways. In the myths and legends it inspired. In the species that have found their niche here. In the fossilized menagerie sticking out of the rock.

And in the geology itself - as these soft sedimentary layers continue to be shaped by wind and rain, the whole landscape is constantly shifting and evolving. In effect, a new place to discover every time.