A Tale of Dinosaurs and Mosquitoes

Tenting is great because you go to sleep when the sun goes down and wake up when one of the following happens: the snoring guy in a tent 3 sites down wakes you up; the sound of birds wakes you up; the rain falling on your tent, turning it into a giant drum wakes you up. It was the latter in this case, and with it being daylight out and me not having a watch, I figured I had slept in. In reality, it was probably no later than 6:00. No matter. The IGA in town was 24 hours, the bank machine didn't care when a person took money out, and there were plenty of trails around to explore. I decided to check one out very close to the dino museum, expecting a very rudimentary path with fauna overtaking the walking space. Instead, it was a fully paved trail about 5 feet wide with the flora carefully trimmed to its edges.




It was a nice path, but built more for roller bladers, so I turned around and headed toward the Royal Tyrrell.



It has been 21 years since the last visit to the RTM. The seven-year-old in me came back out as soon as I got into the parking lot. I couldn't wait!



The first thing you see when you get into the gallery is this

Oddly enough, I saw more little kids terrified by this

The initial display was gorgeous. Set up like a posh art gallery, the exhibits were put in ornate frames, often on velvet backgrounds and classical music was piped in. This wasn't how the entire museum was, however.
Currently, they have a wonderful display on Charles Darwin and his theory of natural selection and evolution. The fossil displays include land, air and sea animals and they have gone to great trouble to separate the different eras and epochs in an effort to show how life has changed over millions of years.
The best part of course, are the dinosaur displays. Dozens of species have been pulled out of the Alberta badlands and many are on display here.

Once through the gallery, there is still the interpretive trail outside to walk around which is well worth the time. I unfortunately didn't have as much of that as I wanted (a person could easily spend 2 days at the RTM) and had to get out toward Brooks where the Dinosaur Provincial Park is located.
Along the way, I did stop by an area just south of Drumheller where the hoodoos are located. The hoowhats? Hoodoos! Yes, they are just as much fun to see as they are to pronounce. The sandstone that's been exposed after the last ice age is gradually eroded by rain and wind, but hoodoos have a harder stone cap on them that acts as a shelter from the elements, thus making the sandstone not as vulnerable to the elements. They are though, very delicate formations - delicate enough that this particular area is deemed protected by the provence.

The area near Brooks is a little deceiving. Most of the terrain is flat with some rolling hills here and there. When getting close to the park, one half expects to see slight variations in the geography like signs of the layered hills. In reality, there is none of that. All of the sudden, the earth just drops away and a huge expanse appears full of valleys and gulleys.

Now, this area is normally very arid, but over the past four days they've gotten a ton of rain. According to the interpreter I asked, that water has pooled all over the badlands and since mosquito eggs can lie dormant for 7 to 10 years, they are now in the middle of one of the worst mosquito attacks in recent memory - bad enough that the paleontologists that have been there for 30 or 40 years have never seen it like it is. I set up my tent swatting away at the pests and thought that it was merely a matter of being in some bush, but they were everywhere. If you had exposed flesh, they bit it. I'll be darned if the little cretins were going to stop me from getting some shots though, so I put up with them for about five hours until I nearly went mad and was forced to retire to the tent for some respite.







The terrain is very cool and chalk full of mule deer. If you're lucky (or unlucky perhaps) you might run into a rattle snake or black widow spider. I'm glad I learned this after I went trucking around everywhere.