JoLoLog

Main • About • Archives • Flickr • Elsewhere

Previous • September 24, 2008 • Next

Rills • Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta's badlands, Alberta, Canada
September 20, 2008 • By Joe

As promised, more from our day trip to Dinosaur Provincial Park last Saturday. The photo above shows many rills - those are a system of channels etched into the soft rocks. They develop during rainstorms when water pound against the rock and streams down the slopes. Taking the path of least resistance, water cuts the rills ever more deeply into the hill. Personally, they remind me of a facial skin of a hundred years old person... deep wrinkles all over the place, a testimony of a life time of challenges and experiences.

Dinosaur Provincial Park is known for the many dinosaur fossil beds in it. 35 species of dinosaurs have been found here, along with skeletal remains of many other species. More than 300 museum quality specimens have been removed and are exhibited in museums around the world.

Wanna see dinosaur remains? No problem - take the bus tour. Most of the park is designated as a Natural Preserve and is off limits to visitors by foot, meaning people can't roam the area

on their own. What they can do is join the Badlands Bus Tour, that takes people into the Natural Preserve.

That's exactly what we did. The tour is done with 24 sits buses, and starts at the Visitors Centre. It costs only 8 $ per person and takes around 2 hours. A park interpreter pointed out the park's landforms and talked about its prehistoric inhabitants. And... he also led us to see dinosaur remains, an almost full skeleton, and many bone remains and fragments. Very interesting! The photo above was taken in the restricted area.

There are more activities people can do in the park on their own. There are few short trails, there's the loop road that leads to these trails, and there's the trail that goes into Little Sandhill Coulee. That was an amazing trail. I told Joe that anyone who needs a weekend to reflect on life and take a time-out... that's the place to do it. A different world... an ancient world... wow!!! (Check the Dinosaur Provincial Park link for the information).

© 2003 and on to Lorien, Joe & Moshe, reborn-by-design.com. All rights reserved.