into Drumheller and the Badlands

Our jack part is being ordered today, so off we went sightseeing. After driving along the flat Alberta grassland for over an hour, we around a corner and down a 100' hill into the Badlands into Drumheller.
First we went to the Atlas Coal Mine, a National Historic site, 15 minutes east of Drumheller at East Coulee, which once had a population of 3000, today 200. One has to remember, in the past, Coal was King. This is the only remaining coal mine of 139 that operated here in the Drumhelller valley. The 8 storey wooden tipple is the only one left in Canada. The 4 coal storage bins in the tipple could hold 80 tons of coal (4 boxcars full). The Atlas employed about 150 workers per year: the miners earned about 65 cents per ton, the surface workers - $4.77 and days of work depended on demand. This mine had an 420 foot shaft and the seam was 3.1 meters thick. Originally the coal cars were hauled by 16 - 24 pit ponies. It was very interesting to walk through the simulated underground display and tour the original buildings.
Website is www.atlascoalmine.ab.ca

Our next stop was a display beside the road of 'HooDoos'. Theses are mushroom shaped pillars of glacier silt and clay 5-7 meters tall which took millions of years to form. If their caps are disturbed they can erode rapidly. You could climb up the path way onto the top of the hill behind. We stopped at a Suspension Bridge crossing the Red Deer River which miners used to get to the Star Mine. They originally had to row across the river.

Then we went to the Royal Tyrrell Museum. This is an incredible place with many different types of dinosaurs, fossils, even sharks, turtle and crocodile. Million of years ago, the Red River Valley was the home of immense dinosaurs: plant-eating hadrosaurs, flesh-eating tyrannosaurs and their formidable cousins stomped through the swampy lowlands and forests bordering the Moray Sea, which once covered the North American Plains. The current display was honoring Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution and even showed the evolution of animal skulls from our earliest ancestor, an upright animal to Homo Sapiens.
At the info center, they have the largest dinosaur in the world, 84' tall with a viewing platform in his mouth. www. tyrrellmuseum.com