Alberta, Canada
INTRODUCTION
Andrew M. Kobos
The Badlands are an area located in Central Alberta, Canada. In fact, the so-called badlands extend along the Red Deer River Valley, east-southwards from the city of Red Deer, AB, through the small city of Drumheller, AB, to the Saskatchewan border.
Badland's heartland, however, is the Drumheller Valley in and
around the city of Drumheller, approximately 130 km northeast of Calgary, AB.
The Drumheller Valley, close to flat farmlands, is well known for its beautiful,
diverse and moonscape-like topography. The rugged valley is made up of erosion
formations, such as buttes and deep, twisted and winding canyons, coulees, and
gullies. The almost bare walls thereof are made of multi-coloured – the hues
changing with sunlight conditions – eroded sediment layers of sandstone or
mudstone and coal, interlaced with shale layers. The steep slopes are strewn
with roofed pillars and hoodoos. The hoodoos are natural yet transient vertical
structures of soft sandstone, differing in height and shape detail, capped with
darker and harder sandstone "hats". Formed by erosion, the hoodoos and
pillars slowly appear and disappear in time. The concerted water and wind
actions continuously "carve" them, change their shapes, and eventually
destroy them one by one.
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The name "Badlands" is an exact English translation of French term "les mauvaises terres" (bad lands), by which in 1743 French Canadian explorers François and Louis Joseph de la Verendrye described this terrain when on their travels through the Prairies they first had encountered the landscapes of mesas, buttes, canyons, coulees, and gullies. Early French settlers of the area found this arid land to be unsuitable to farming and thus they retained the appropriate term "les mauvaises terres " or "bad lands." However, they soon discovered the terrain was rich in coal and fossils.
In fact, it was the First Nations people who first discovered
animal fossils in this area. They believed them to be the vestiges of gigantic
ancestors of the Bison. They also believed these badlands were one giant
graveyard for these animals, and the unusual, taller or lower, hard-capped
sandstone formations, they called the Hoodoos, were the protectors of the bison's
and ancient animals' spirits.
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Great rivers flowed in the area over 70 million years ago. Below, we quote a brief geological and palaeontological description of the Badlands.
"Badlands are landscapes that are intricately eroded, steeply sloped, largely devoid of vegetation and characterized by narrow, winding channels and gullies. [...] Although the Drumheller badlands have a strange look of an alien or ancient world, this is not the kind of world the dinosaurs inhabited. When the dinosaurs reigned, 230 million to 65 million years ago, this area was a series of deltas and river flood plains extending east into a warm, shallow inland sea. The tracts of badlands [...] were carved by melt water torrents in the wake of retreating ice sheets, 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. Evidence suggests spillways were the result of flash floods rather than rivers, which carve out valleys progressively over a long period of time.Erosion has created many unusual landscape features such as hoodoos, temporary pillars of rock with protective caps of harder rock; glacial erratics, freestanding boulders; mud drapings, hardened mud which looks like icing slipping off a cake; ephemeral creeks, small rivulets which come and go with the rain; and sink holes, unexpected openings into caverns. One of the most striking features of the Drumheller Badlands are the multicoloured, flat-lying layers of exposed rock on the surrounding slopes. With the exception of a visible top soft layer, all the rock layers date back to the Late Cretaceous, a period of time just before the demise of the dinosaurs. Layers from subsequent time periods have been scraped off by natural processes. Most of southern Alberta is underlain by alternating layers of sedimentary strata – sandstone, mudstone, and coal sequences alternate with shale sequences. The shale sequences indicate times when an eastern inland sea periodically extended over what is now Alberta. The sediments were deposited by the action of ancient rivers, swamps and floods. Following burial and a long passage of time, these sediments were converted into sedimentary rock of the Late Cretaceous Age, 75 to 65 million years ago. Then these layers were buried beneath layers from more recent time periods. In the Drumheller Badlands, these more recent layers are not present. Erosion was accelerated during the Ice Ages by four glacial advances and retreats. But the glaciers did leave their own telltale layer of unconsolidated sediments. Formed during the Pleistocene Epoch, the uppermost layer of the valley walls varies in thickness from less than a metre to a hundred metres. Between the Pleistocene and the Late Cretaceous layers is a time gap of at least 64 million years. The exposed sedimentary rock layers along the Red Deer River Valley around Drumheller are referred to as the Horseshoe Canyon Formation. Black layers are coal seams. Dark grey layers are mudstone. Lighter grey layers are sandstone. As these layers continue to erode, fragments of dinosaur bone, petrified wood and are other fossils are exposed. [...]"
Taken from:
http://www.ucalgary.ca/applied_history/tutor/calgary/badlands.html
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The Drumheller Badlands are one of the few areas in the world where sedimentary layers from earlier geological periods have been scraped off by natural processes, exposing a rich deposit of animal and plant fossils and even complete dinosaur skeletons. No wonder the area the Drumheller Badlands canyons proved to be vast terrains of fossil discovery.
As to the preserved palaeontological finds by the Europeans, the large skull of the first dinosaur remains, known today as Albertasaurus, was discovered on a creek bank in this area by the explorer, cartographer, geologist, and mineralogist Joseph Burr Tyrrell in April 1884. Among very many fossils, bones of approximately 25 species of dinosaurs have been discovered in these badlands since 1884. In the city of Drumheller the large Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology has become a world-renown centre dedicated to the study of dinosaurs.
Over many millions of years, the life cycle in the area took
turns from a thriving wetland wildlife, dinosaur included, through glacier
covered ice-land, later swept by rushing melting water to become an arid,
lifeless riverbed, to the emergence of new desert life. At the present time a
number of plant species have adapted to the harsh, desert-like environment of
the badlands. Several species of cactus can be found here along with the prairie
crocus, sage and saskatoon bushes. Of the animal world one can see here
bluebirds, chipmunks, gophers, garter snakes, and mule deer.
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17 km west of Drumheller, literally below the nearly flat prairie, close to Red Dear River, there is an isolated pocket of badlands, called the Horseshoe Canyon. The bird-eye view from atop of this vast grey and dark green canyon, its many scattered buttes, mesas and coulees, is both awesome and breathtaking. To some it may remind the Grand Canyon of Colorado in a smaller scale.
Horseshoe Canyon is an area rich with geological, natural, and cultural history. The geological layers of Horseshoe Canyon were laid down during the Cretaceous Period about 70 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the lush forests and swamps of the region. These deposit layers can now be seen on the exposed walls of the Horseshoe Canyon.
Horseshoe Canyon shelters three ecosystems: the prairie, the wooded coulee slopes, and the badlands. Prairie wild grasses, once the nourishment of herds of plains bison, is found at Horseshoe Canyon along coulee edges, on top of mesas, and on the valley floor. North facing slopes of the coulees provide shade from the sun's searing heat. In contrast to the sun-exposed slopes, shaded areas have lush growth including white spruce, wild roses (incidentally Alberta's symbol), and saskatoon bushes.
On the cultural side, the land at Horseshoe Canyon was once part
of the nomadic territory of the First Nations' Blackfoot tribe. Bison was
their primary source of food and provided raw material for clothing, shelter,
tools, ceremonial ornaments as well as fuel. Not surprisingly then, they
regarded the hoodoos to be the spiritual protectors and guardians of the dead
bison and bison's giant ancestors.
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Further to the southwest, a secondary highway comes down to Red River, along buttes on the right hand side. Their steep slopes display eroded mudstone with pillars and drapings being slowly formed, small caverns and large, oval lumps, half-turned into rocks. Higher on the slopes, stick out isolated sandstone cliffs. A ferry ships people and cars across the river, small here. It may, however, become very menacing and destructive during a flash flood. It has actually so happened in early June 2005.
In the opposite direction, not far from Drumheller, an site
spreads out, full of unusual, quite tall hoodoos with large caps of harder,
brownish sandstone.
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On July 10, 2005, I was in the Badlands with my friend Dr. Henryk Dħbrowski of Edmonton, AB. It was the first time I was there on a sunny day. Our, long car trip, obviously only across a part of the Drumheller Badlands, resulted in dozens of my photographs, a selection of which you are welcome to browse on these web pages.
Andrew M. Kobos
