Aylmer Express "MoHo" Extravaganza 2006

metier \met-YAY; MET-yay\, noun:
1. An occupation; a profession.
2. An area in which one excels; an occupation for which one is especially well suited.

So I look out the window and I think to myself, “How did we manage to get so lucky as to enjoy yet another beautiful sunny and hot day.” We woke up early this morning to try to fit in more stuff than normal ... little did we know! You'll see what I'm talking about later. We started off with … some homework. Homework? On a Saturday? Did you hear me correctly? Yes you did. It appears that Chantal is a real slave driver when it comes to teaching. But it did not last too long as we were off to see the HooDoos of the Badlands of the Red Deer River valley. As you can see from the photos, the scenery here is quite unique to say the least. I learned later this day why this valley looks the way it does. It turns out that a few million years or so ago there was a big ice pack covering much of what is now the prairies and was blocking the original path of the Red Deer river. The river started backing up and a huge lake was being created in front of the ice pack. After a while something had to give and what happened was that all the water in this new “lake” burst through the weakest link. That weakest link was a route around the bottom of the ice pack and thousands of cubic kilometers of water plowed through hundreds of meters of earth creating what is now the Red Deer River valley. In the process this raging torrent of water exposed millions of years of history that was buried in the earth. Even today you can still see the layers of earth that have accumulated over the centuries. Quite incredible.
We only had to drive about 10 miles to get to where the most prominent hoodoos are located in that area. Hoodoos, for those who are not familiar, are pillar-like formations which have a large rock on top. They were formed by having the “softer” rock underneath the rock being eroded away by wind and water at a faster rate than the harder rock on top which acts like an umbrella thereby sparing the pillar portion from same rate of erosion. Are you starting to feel like you are in geology class? Anyway, these particular specimens where not as big as I was expecting. I thought that there would be many more and that there would be a lot of different sizes. But they were still cool. Then A-P, Morgan and I attempted to climb to the top of the hill. We could have made it to the top I’m sure, given some temerity, but, you see, the problem was coming back down. Oh I’m sure we would have made it to the bottom as well but I needed to know that we would be descending by foot rather than the more likely “rag doll” style (also known as “ass-over-tea-kettle” in some dialects) that shirley would have taken place based on the angle of the slope and the coefficient of friction available. We did make it about three quarters of the way up, which was high enough to gather this critical information, and we were afforded an excellent view from there as well.


(Trivia Question: Can you identify who is in the photo above? I just checked what the resolution of this picture is for you and I'm thinking you might just have to take an educated guess.)

Then it was a quick picnic with the backdrop of the Alberta Badlands followed by a trip to the renowned, world famous Royal Tyrrell Museum to find out more about all this dinosaur talk in the area. This is a truly amazing and impressive museum. Everything has been so well done. We spent about 4 hours there and we didn’t have nearly enough time to take in everything. The dinosaur bones on display there are really unbelievable. It is hard to imagine, as you stand just a few feet away from a fully complete skeleton of a huge dinosaur, that what you are looking at is real. Those are real bones from a real animal. It actually was alive at one time and used to roam the area where the museum stands today. They found many of these bones right here in Drumheller! I can only imagine what it must feel like to be the one who uncovers one of the massive dinosaur skulls intact. It must be like you are reaching back in time … touching something that few humans have ever touched in the history of humanity.
And finding out how many of these bones and fossils ended up where they are today is an interesting story in itself. I was fascinated to learn the story of the Burgess Shale Fields in the mountains of British Columbia. It turns out that the Rocky Mountains were created by two continental plates pushing against each other and squishing the rock and earth along the edges upward. Way upward! Somewhere in the middle of these mountains is some shale that used to be at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean but got pushed up onto the side of one of the mountains. In this shale are hundreds of thousands of fossils of marine animals that existed over 500 million years ago. They created an exhibit showing a recreation of these creatures at 12 times their normal size so that we humans can see the detail more easily. Quite an impressive display for sure. They also have created a garden exclusively of plants that existed about 70 millions years ago, the Cretaceous period. It has about 600 species of plants that existed in prehistoric times in the Drumheller area thereby allowing us to see what the dinosaurs feasted on. Very cool.

After our day at the museum we were looking forward to an early night. BUT when we got back to our car we had a flyer on the window talking about an outdoor movie night at a natural amphitheatre within the Drumheller badlands.They were showing the movie Madagascar under the stars and the kids really wanted to go so we said, “What the Heck”! Of course, the sky doesn’t get dark until about 10:00 so it was a very late night. But it was fun. We even saw 2 shooting stars while we were taking in the movie! It was a good time for sure but we are definitely sleeping in tomorrow …GOOD NIGHT!