Dinosaurs fascinate everyone, whatever their age, so a stop in Drumheller was never in doubt when we planned our road trip through the Alberta Badlands. This is the dinosaur capital of Canada, and it commits to the theme completely. The streets are named after dinosaurs. There are painted dinosaurs on the rooftops. There is a Tyrannosaurus rex you can climb inside and look out of.
Underneath the theme park there is a remarkable place, and a landscape unlike anywhere else we have been.
Drumheller is about 90 minutes north east of Calgary in the Alberta Badlands. The Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology is the main reason to come and deserves half a day on its own. Add the Dinosaur Trail scenic loop, Horseshoe Canyon and the hoodoos, and you need two days to do it properly. One long day is possible from Calgary.
Drumheller sits on the Red Deer River in eastern Alberta, roughly 135km north east of Calgary. The drive takes about 90 minutes, heading north on Highway 2 then east on Highway 72, which becomes Highway 9 and takes you into town.
That drive is the single most common way people reach Drumheller, and it is worth doing rather than flying over. The prairie runs flat and unremarkable for an hour, and then the ground simply falls away in front of you into a striped, eroded valley. It is one of the more dramatic arrivals in Canada.
If you are not driving, full day guided tours run from Calgary and cover the Royal Tyrrell Museum, the hoodoos and Horseshoe Canyon in a single day, with hotel pickup included. That is a sensible option if you are basing yourself in Calgary or would rather not tackle the drive, though you will be moving quickly.
We came the long way, driving in from Saskatoon as part of a two week loop. Drive times for the full route are in our road trip planning guide.
The Badlands are called that because when European settlers arrived they found the broken, gullied terrain difficult, or "bad", to cross. The name stuck, unfairly, for what is now one of Alberta's biggest draws.
Because of what the ice left behind, and because of a geologist looking for coal.
The rock here is Late Cretaceous, laid down roughly 70 to 75 million years ago when this part of Alberta was a warm, low-lying coastal plain beside an inland sea. Conditions were close to subtropical, life flourished, and dinosaurs lived here in enormous numbers. When they died, river sediment buried them quickly, which is exactly what fossils need in order to form.
The landscape you see is far younger. About 13,000 years ago, as the ice sheets retreated, torrents of glacial meltwater tore through the soft sedimentary rock and carved out the valleys and canyons. That erosion sliced open the fossil beds like a knife through a layer cake, and it continues today. Wind and rain expose new material every year.
Then, in August 1884, a geologist named Joseph Burr Tyrrell was surveying coal deposits in the Red Deer River Valley for the Geological Survey of Canada when he came across the skull of a large carnivorous dinosaur. It was later named Albertosaurus sarcophagus, a smaller relative of Tyrannosaurus rex, and it was the first of its kind ever found.
Tyrrell’s discovery set off what became known as the Great Canadian Dinosaur Rush in the early 1900s, when museums worldwide paid fossil hunters to work these badlands. Alberta has since yielded one of the richest concentrations of dinosaur fossils on earth, and Drumheller sits at the centre of it.
The museum that opened here in 1985 was named in Tyrrell’s honour.
The Royal Tyrrell is the reason to come to Drumheller, and it exceeded everything we expected. It is Canada’s only museum devoted entirely to prehistoric life, and it is a working research institution rather than a display of casts.
The scale of it is what lands first. There are hundreds of fossils on permanent display across the galleries, including more than thirty dinosaur specimens in the main hall, and the collection held behind the scenes is vastly larger than what visitors see.
What we saw, among a great deal else – an almost complete Triceratops skull, a fossilised dinosaur footprint, beautiful ammonites, stegosaurus, a woolly mammoth and a T. rex (not Scotty). The Albertosaurus display, built around a bonebed where at least a dozen individuals were found together, suggests these animals may have hunted in groups.
You can watch the palaeontologists working. There is a window into the preparation lab, and staff will answer questions. For anyone who has ever wondered what actually happens to a fossil between the ground and the display case, this is the best part of the building.
Practical points:
Allow at least half a day: We would give it longer next time. Three hours is the minimum to do it justice.
Book ahead in summer: It is by some distance the busiest attraction in the valley.
There are guided badlands walks: Staff-led hikes into the terrain around the museum buildings run seasonally.
There is plenty for younger children: Hands-on exhibits, activity programmes and a cafeteria on site.
Check what is on: Programming changes through the year, so look at the museum website before you go.
Do Horseshoe Canyon before the museum. Standing in the canyon first, then seeing bones that came out of ground like that, connects the two in a way that doing it the other way round does not.
The Dinosaur Trail is a scenic driving loop of around 48km. It runs north west out of Drumheller as the North Dinosaur Trail (Highway 838), crosses the Red Deer River on a small cable ferry, and comes back on the South Dinosaur Trail (Highway 837, then 575). Allow two to three hours with stops, or most of a day if you take your time.
What you pass, in order:
Sits just off the north side of the loop.
A tiny chapel originally built in 1968 and rebuilt in 1991. Locals say it seats ten thousand people, six at a time. Free to enter and takes five minutes.
A viewpoint over a wide, deeply eroded section of the valley. Better than it sounds from the car park.
A free cable ferry that has been carrying vehicles across the Red Deer River since 1913. The crossing takes a few minutes and it only holds a handful of cars, so you may wait. It runs seasonally, roughly May to late October, and is closed through winter..
Reached by a short, bumpy dirt road off the south side. Sweeping views up and down the river valley, and the best light in the late afternoon. Closed in winter.
Check the ferry is running before you set out, because without it the loop becomes a considerably longer drive around.
Separately, and confusingly, there is also a self-guided walk around the painted dinosaur statues in town, known as the Dino Walk or the Dino Trail. It is free, it takes an hour or two, and it is the thing our teenagers talked about most on the way home.
There are more than thirty statues scattered across downtown and the wider valley, and they are all named. Dinnie in Rotary Park. Gus and Effie sitting on their benches. Curt, the selfie raptor, positioned exactly where you would want him. Arenasaurus, Pride Dino, Patty the Parasaurolophus, Eugene, and Tyra herself, who is the largest of the lot by a considerable margin. There is one riding a motorcycle.
You do not really need a map, because they are everywhere once you start looking – on rooftops, in doorways, leaning out of windows. Painted dinosaur footprints on the pavements lead you between some of them. That said, the official map is worth having if you want to tick off the named ones, and it is at dinoarts.ca/dino-map. Travel Drumheller lists them too.
The first dinosaur, Dinnie, went up in Rotary Park in 1960 for Dominion Day. Most of the rest were built through the following years for a theme park called Prehistoric Park, and when that closed the dinosaurs simply migrated out into the town, where they have stayed ever since. They are made of rebar and concrete, some are pushing sixty years old, and they are emphatically art rather than science. If you want anatomical accuracy, that is what the Royal Tyrrell is for.
They are looked after by the Drumheller DinoArts Association, a local non-profit working in partnership with the Chamber of Commerce, who own and insure them. DinoArts fundraises, repairs, commissions new ones and organises the volunteers and community groups who repaint the older statues each year. It is not a small job. Weather, age and the occasional collision take a steady toll, and a few have been lost altogether over the years, including one hit by a van.
Because the collection changes as statues are repaired, retired or added, check the DinoArts map or Travel Drumheller for current locations rather than relying on an older list.
We did ours as a pre-dinner wander, found the Greetings from Drumheller mural along the way, and would happily have kept going. It pairs perfectly with an ice cream and it is the best free hour in town.
About fifteen minutes south west of Drumheller, on the road in from Calgary, is the trailhead for Horseshoe Canyon. If you are driving from Calgary this is your first badlands stop, and it is a good introduction.
The canyon was carved by glacial meltwater at the end of the last ice age. You descend from the car park by a wooden staircase to the right hand side, and there is a trail of a couple of miles around the canyon floor.
Going down feels like stepping into another world, which in a sense it is. It no longer resembles the warm subtropical landscape the dinosaurs lived in, but it is remarkable: a bowl of striped, multi-coloured hills sitting in an otherwise flat valley. We stood at the bottom slightly stunned. It looks like nowhere else we have been.
Parking is a small charge. Wear proper shoes, since the surface is loose, and stay off it entirely after rain, when the clay becomes treacherous.
The Drumheller Hoodoos are a fifteen minute drive east of town on Highway 10, sometimes called the Hoodoo Trail. There is a large car park directly beside them. We had assumed there would be a hike involved and there is not, which was mildly disappointing and very convenient.
Hoodoos are tall, thin sandstone spires, some reaching around seven metres, formed over millions of years as wind and water eroded softer rock away from beneath a harder capstone. They are nicknamed fairy chimneys.
Blackfoot and Cree traditions hold that the hoodoos are petrified giants who come alive at night to protect the land, hurling stones at intruders. There are signs asking visitors to stay off them and to be careful where they walk, both for the sake of the rock and out of respect.
Not everyone reads the signs. They were swarming with people climbing on them when we arrived in mid afternoon, and it was easily the busiest place we visited on the whole trip. Go early or late if you can. They are still worth seeing.
Outside the visitor centre in downtown Drumheller stands Tyra, the world’s largest dinosaur, a Tyrannosaurus rex of around 26 metres.
You buy a ticket inside the visitor centre, climb just over a hundred steps up through the inside of her, and emerge in her mouth to look out across Drumheller through her teeth. It is ridiculous. It is also, obviously, something you have to do.
The charge is small and the view is very good. Ticket prices change, so check on arrival rather than budgeting from anything you read online.
On the same outing as the hoodoos, heading east, there are three more stops worth building in.
Wayne is reached by a 6km detour off Highway 10 along a road that crosses the Rosebud River eleven times on eleven single lane bridges, which is a very silly and enjoyable drive. Drumheller had a coal boom in the early twentieth century and Wayne housed thousands of the workers. Tempers ran high, and legend has it the bartender at the Last Chance Saloon fired warning shots at a customer who would not pay. The bullet holes are framed on the wall. It was closed the day we came, so we bought a Saskatoon berry ice cream from the shop next door instead.
The Star Mine Suspension Bridge was built in 1931 to carry coal miners across the Red Deer River. It wobbles considerably and reportedly holds around twenty people. Our teenagers were unmoved. The engineer in the family was delighted.
The Atlas Coal Mine National Historic Site is the one we missed and should not have. It is one of Alberta’s longest running mines, with the last wooden coal tipple in Canada still standing, and it runs themed guided tours through the site. Drumheller’s coal history is the reason the town exists at all, and it is a useful counterweight to the dinosaurs. Build it in.
A fair question, and the answer is usually Drumheller.
Dinosaur Provincial Park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site roughly two hours south east of Drumheller, and it is where a huge proportion of the world’s most significant Alberta specimens have come from, including many now displayed at the Royal Tyrrell.
The difference is what you go for – Drumheller has the museum, the town, the accommodation and the family attractions. Dinosaur Provincial Park has the fossil beds themselves, guided excavation tours and far wilder badlands scenery, with much less infrastructure.
If you have one stop, choose Drumheller. The Royal Tyrrell is the better single experience and everything else is close by.
If you have three days or a serious interest, do both. They complement each other rather than repeating.
We chose Drumheller on this trip because we had already had our fill of remote badlands at Grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan. Next time we would add Dinosaur Provincial Park.
Summer is busiest and everything is open, including the Bleriot Ferry and Orkney Viewpoint, both of which close in winter. Late spring and early autumn are quieter with most things still running. The badlands are exposed and there is almost no shade, so take water and sun protection in July and August.
Two nights is right. That gives you a full day for the Royal Tyrrell and the Dinosaur Trail, and a second for the hoodoos, Wayne and the Atlas Coal Mine. One long day from Calgary works if the museum is your priority and you accept you will miss the rest. Three days lets you add Dinosaur Provincial Park.
Drumheller is small and options are limited, so book ahead in summer.
We stayed at the Canalta Jurassic Hotel, booked through Booking.com. It is laid out like a motel, with parking directly outside your ground floor room, and it is functional and clean. It also has the slightly odd feature of a washbasin inside the bedroom rather than the bathroom, which we never quite got used to.
There are campgrounds along the Dinosaur Trail if you would rather be out of town, and a handful of inns and B&Bs in the valley.
In Drumheller itself, there are very few options, but The Waldorf Hotel is the last original hotel in the town.
For a town of this size, Drumheller does better on food than you would expect, and rather better than we managed in two nights.
Vintage Kitchen and Bar: Downtown, and it does not take reservations, so we queued about fifteen minutes on a summer evening. Good atmosphere, decent family food and sport on the screens, which on our visit was the Saskatchewan Roughriders.
Bernie and the Boys Bistro: The local institution, and the one everybody tells you about. Alberta beef burgers, onion rings and a milkshake menu running well past seventy flavours. It turned up on Food Network's You Gotta Eat Here and has been busy ever since. Take the children, or use them as an excuse.
WHIFS Flapjack House: Breakfast, and the place locals send you for it before a day in the badlands. Straightforward, generous and popular enough that people go back twice in one trip.
Sam's Kitchen: Indian cooking, and consistently at or near the top of Drumheller's restaurant lists. A useful change of pace if you have been eating burgers and museum cafeteria food for two days.
And if you are heading out to Wayne for the hoodoos and the Star Mine Suspension Bridge, the Last Chance Saloon does food alongside its bullet holes. It was shut the day we went, so we still have not managed it.
In closing
You do not need to be a child to be floored by the Royal Tyrrell, or to find it strange and moving to walk into a canyon where the animals inside it actually lived..
Until next time Drumheller!
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