Drive an hour northeast of Calgary across flat Alberta wheat country and the road simply falls away. The Red Deer River has cut a 120-metre gash into the prairie, exposing bands of grey shale, rust sandstone, and seams of black coal that stack like the pages of a half-buried book. Every layer is a record of something that lived and died here long before there was a Drumheller, or a prairie, or a continent shaped like the one outside the window. This is the badlands, and 75 million years ago it was a coastal lowland crawling with dinosaurs. Their bones have been weathering out of these cliffs ever since. In 1884 a young Geological Survey of Canada surveyor named Joseph Burr Tyrrell - looking for coal, not fossils - tripped over a skull that turned out to belong to a previously unknown predator. He named it Albertosaurus. The skull is still here, in the museum that bears his name, in the small town that calls itself, with some justification, the Dinosaur Capital of the World.
Joseph Tyrrell was 26 and looking for coal seams to feed Canada's expanding railways when he found the skull on a hillside near what is now Midland Provincial Park. He recognized immediately that it belonged to something nobody had described. The fossil sat in storage in Ottawa for years before paleontologists got around to naming it. Albertosaurus sarcophagus - the Alberta meat-eating lizard - turned out to be a close cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex, about two-thirds the size and a few million years older. Tyrrell himself went on to a long career mapping the Canadian north, eventually surveying half the territory between Manitoba and the Arctic Ocean. The museum the province built in 1985 on the bluffs above his original find now holds over 160,000 catalogued specimens. The skull he tripped over is among them, looking exactly as it did the day he picked it up.
Inside the museum, the main hall stops people in their tracks. Forty mounted skeletons stand in a single long room - duck-bills with crested skulls, horned ceratopsians, armored ankylosaurs the size of small cars, and at the centre a Tyrannosaurus rex called Black Beauty, named for the manganese minerals that turned her bones a deep glossy black as she fossilized. She was found in 1980 by a teenager fishing on the Crowsnest River. She is one of the most complete T. rex skeletons in the world. Down the hall, a Dimetrodon - the sail-backed predator that walked the Earth 50 million years before the first dinosaur - reminds visitors that the Mesozoic was not the beginning of the story. The Tyrrell does not just display these animals. It works on them. Glass walls along one corridor look into the preparation lab, where technicians spend years easing single bones out of plaster jackets with dental tools.
Downtown Drumheller commits unreservedly to the bit. Every business has a dinosaur outside its door. Trash cans wear dinosaur snouts. A fibreglass herd grazes the median strip on the main street. And at the visitor centre stands Tyra, the World's Largest Dinosaur - an 86-foot fibreglass and steel Tyrannosaurus rex four and a half times the size of any T. rex that ever lived, built in 2000 for roughly 1.05 million Canadian dollars of community money and provincial grants. She is gloriously inaccurate. Her arms are too long, her head too big, her stance a little theatrical. None of it matters. For ten dollars and 106 stairs, you can climb up through her hollow neck and stand inside her open mouth, looking out over Drumheller through a row of teeth at the badlands beyond. It is roadside Americana at its most committed, and it is impossible not to grin.
Fifteen minutes east of town on Highway 10, a stretch of badlands has been worn into a forest of stone mushrooms. The hoodoos form because a layer of harder sandstone caps a column of softer mudstone underneath; rain and wind eat the soft rock from the sides until only a narrow pedestal is left, holding up its stone cap like an umbrella. They look architectural, almost deliberate. The Blackfoot called them the petrified remains of giants. They are also doomed - each storm takes a little more, and the hoodoos visible today will not be the hoodoos visible in a century. The same erosion that destroys them, however, is what makes the badlands a paleontological miracle. Every year, the cliffs surrender more bones than the museum can collect. Researchers walk slowly across the slopes after spring rains, looking for the dark glint of a tooth or the curve of a rib protruding from grey shale.
Before it was a dinosaur town, Drumheller was a coal town. Between 1911 and the 1970s, more than 130 mines worked the seams along the Red Deer River, and at its peak the valley held 30,000 people across a string of company towns: Wayne, Rosedale, East Coulee, Atlas. The coal was the same Cretaceous coal Joseph Tyrrell had been hunting in 1884 - the compressed remains of swamps the dinosaurs walked through. When the mines closed, most of the towns vanished. The Atlas Coal Mine, the last to shut down, is now a National Historic Site, with its wooden tipple still standing over the river. Drumheller itself shrank, then reinvented itself around the bones the miners had been ignoring for decades. The dinosaur capital is built on top of the coal capital, and on top of the swamp that produced them both.
Drumheller sits in the Red Deer River valley at approximately 51.46 N, 112.72 W, 130 km northeast of Calgary. The valley itself is the defining feature from the air - a sharp gash through otherwise unbroken prairie, with the river meandering at its bottom and the museum visible on the north rim above Midland Provincial Park. Drumheller Municipal (CEG4) is a small uncontrolled field 5 km east of town and is the only practical local landing option; Calgary International (CYYC) is the nearest commercial hub. Springbank (CYBW) is a good GA alternate. Summer thunderstorms build fast over the prairies; the valley walls funnel afternoon winds, sometimes creating turbulence below 3,000 feet AGL. Best photography light hits the striped badlands an hour before sunset.