The Badlands at Drumheller

I've taken a few runs at in, but I'd never actually seen the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller.  Our stay in Calgary was winding to a close and I wasn't going to miss it for the third time.  The drive from Calgary was mostly quick - in no time we were out in the flat fields.  Seeing the badlands come up was quite a surprise.

The Museum itself was quite good - many of the exhibits were real fossils and the casts were labeled as such (unlike some other other institutions.)  The museum was well organized, and you do learn as you go.  The audio wands are useless - they are 80% of whats on the signs, and 20% new material.  For people who have a degree (but not in dead stuff), the material was a little thin - more depth and analysis would be appreciated.

We had to reverse the car ride out and I wasn't keen on a long ride without taking a walk first.  The badlands is a cross between desert and a drainage ditch - a dry environment with lots of hills, gullies and detail depending on depth.  Having just come from the rockies, it was a completely different environment.  Rather than just shoot like mad, I limited myself to just one roll of film, and just one lens - my Nikkor 80-200 f/2.8 AFS (not much of a hardship, I know).

It never ceases to amaze me life hanging on in marginal conditions. Grass covered most good land, but when the going got tough so did the plants.  The bush is growing on the last remnants of uneroded soil - a few good rain storms and it's roots may be gone.  The Cactus were growing in the grass and only on the sunny sides of hills - I think the conditions were just starting to get bad enough for them to thrive.