Day Seven - 10/23/07 - When Time Stood Still: Dinosaur Bones and Frozen Wooly Mammoths

We wandered westward to a province named Alberta. We had heard lore of land where dinosaurs dropped their bones, the Earth made a slush puppie, and the dregs drifted down river, exposing what once held up the largest land animals of all time. Dinosaur Provincial Park in Eastern Alberta is every kid’s dinosaur phase ice cream dream. Picture the Badlands of South Dakota, but a bit smaller and less colorful and filled with dinosaur bones. More dinosaur bones have been found in this park than in any other spot on the planet, 35 different species in all. While we were hoping to unearth a triceratops vertebrae (the ultimate tourist trinket), signs warned us that any dinosaur poachers would be shot at the moment the thought of taking bones entered their minds, so we concentrated really hard…on Berenstein Bears and how the only things which differentiated Sister Bear from Brother Bear were a ribbon and the color pink. Here are some pictures:

Brad is a Japanese tourist.

Brad rides a dolphin.

After leaving the park, we drove past the bones of a more contemporary dinosaur, the Olympic facilities leftover from the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary. The luge track and ski jump stood illuminated on the hillside to remind highway goers of the former glory, the flames if you will, of Calgary. Calgary serves as the gateway to two of the largest and most magnificent national parks in North America, Banff and Jasper. I’ve seen a lot of mountains, and the Canadian Rockies take the cake for the most dramatic and awe-inspiring of them all. Nowhere else is it more evident how the forces of time combine with rock and ice to form mountains; these mountains are young and they jut into the sky as if to show every living thing in the valley that they ain’t shit.

We came in under the cover of darkness, got to our campsite, cooked up some food, and then ventured out to the parking lot for some mountain-gazing. We had an almost full moon to light up the snowy peaks surrounding us. The four peaks we could see looked like they each belonged to their own fantasy story and just happened to be strolling through the neighborhood. The one closest to us looked like a Wooly Mammoth frozen in time. We enjoyed watching the shifting designs of the clouds floating by. Bryan saw a sled being drawn by a giant bunny, Gordon saw a duck, Brad saw the face of a lion, and we all saw Yoda…fucking incredible it was.