Drumheller I – badlands and hoodoos
This article is part of the series “2026-09: Canada”.
September 23
After a night in the village town city of Red Deer my wife Annika and I continued our journey southeastwards. We are in the prairies now, which are dominated by farmland and large grain fields. While the terrain is slightly hilly, most streets are dead-straight. They go either north—south or west—east, making the map look like squared paper.
The fields can be huge from a Central European perspective. Sometimes there is an old barn, sometimes a grain silo and sometimes there is a pumpjack, because in Alberta oil is still being extracted. But mostly it is grain fields, some already harvested, some not yet.
Harvesters collect the grain, and lorries transport it, leaving a long track of dust behind. At one place we see a GrainsConnect plant with large silos for interim storage and a train to dispatch the grain further, most probably to the Pacific Ocean to be shipped overseas.
Of course I love the spectacular mountain views, the incredible rain forests with their old and mighty trees and the turquoise alpine lakes. But I also love the monotonous rhythms of these prairies. They are part of the Great Plains east of the Rocky Mountains, which stretch from Alberta and Saskatchewan through the USA into Mexico. (We didn’t drive that far that day ….)
You get into this rhythm of the squared patchwork, then you start to wonder what these fractal-like disruptions on the navigation map are, and all of a sudden you are in a completely different type of landscape – the badlands.
The plains are gone and now you are amidst these eroded mountains. Let’s hear, how Copilot AI describes the next image:
“Overall, I’d describe this as a well-exposed stratified badlands butte showing millions of years of sedimentary deposition and subsequent erosion.”
The area has sparse, desert-like vegetation on the sandy ground, including cacti like these plains pricklypears.
Then you drive further, a bit uphill and Bam! – you are in the plains again as if the badlands had just been a dream.
Now we are not far away from Drumheller, our destination for today, but first we have to check out the Bleriot Ferry, a cable ferry crossing the Red Deer River. The ferry operator tells us that we can (and should) use the ferry, that the road to Drumheller on the other side is closed, that we should drive there anyhow to the viewpoint, and that we could come back here thereafter. Sounds like a plan. We take the ferry – it is free, ignore the “road closed” sign and park on the small car park by the Orkney Viewpoint. And that’s an incredible viewpoint over the dusty Badlands – 72 million years old, the Red Deer River with its green, mellow banks and, in the distance the prairies. A perfect place to have a light lunch with bread, dips, and cookies.
We head back the very same way and take the ferry again. From there it is only twenty minutes to Drumheller where we’ll stay in a motel for two days. The town looks a bit like a dinosaur theme park – dinos everywhere! – because numerous dinosaur fossils have been discovered in the area, making it one of the most important paleontological regions in the world. The town is also home to the famous Royal Tyrrell Museum that we plan to visit the next day.
In the late afternoon, we take the car to Willow Creek, which is well-known for its hoodoos – geological rock formations created by erosion. Annika and I take a walk and gaze at nature’s art exhibition.
Before we drive back to the motel I want to take some better photos of the hoodoos, now that most other tourists have left. I take a first photo …
… and then slowly but surely the evening sun that hid behind a layer of clouds comes out and all of a sudden the hoodoos start to glow in the warmest sunset colours imaginable, as if they were glowing from within. I’m truly happy that I can experience that moment and that I have my Nikon at hand. This moment teaches me that if you want a good photo, look for a good subject; but if you want a better photo, wait for the light.
