Dinosaur Country

Dinosaur Country

Thursday 13 Sept 2007

Spent Wed night in Cut Bank, Montana. We were not ‘moved on’ from the Rest Area, but from the continual ‘traffic’ it is obviously the chosen night-time meeting place of the local ‘youth’! Freight trains also made some considerable noise during the night, but they don’t squeal, or curse and swear quite the same?

Drove on to West Glacier, and proceeded up the ‘Going to the Sun’ highway, which runs through the park from West to East. Driving this road is a harrowing experience for one who hates ‘heights’, as I do. The situation was exacerbated by the massive roadworks being conducted on the worst stretches, in a number of places requiring a 15-minute stop while a pilot car guides batches of single lane traffic through the ongoing reconstruction.

How those guys built the original road back in the 1920’s is beyond belief. There are sections where the side of the road, generally bounded only by a small stone wall about 6” high, literally ‘falls away’ vertically for a 1000’! One of the ‘visitor blurbs’ by the roadside said that labourers and equipment were suspended over the cliff face on manila ropes in order to drill the rock for blasting charges to create the initial ‘bench’ on which the road was laid.

Most of the roadworks being conducted were replacing said ‘stone walls’, many of which have either been ‘washed away’ or suffered subsidence. Lovely feeling, driving next to a 1000’ drop on a sinking piece of roadway with a massive ‘camber’ tilting you the WRONG WAY!!! And that was on the ‘good’ pieces that weren’t being repaired!

As luck would have it, the traverse from West to East put me on the ‘outside lane’ all the way!! Nevertheless, I persevere to the summit, and then spend the next 12 miles ‘Going Away from the Sun’, on the downhill equivalent of the earlier uphill. Heart palpitations and sweaty palms aside, the scenery and towering cliffs are magnificent and the water in the lakes is crystal clear.

Although the general ‘speed limit’ for the park appears to be 45MPH, I find that travelling that fast is either totally unnerving for me (on the steep parts) or too fast to see anything (on the ‘other’ parts). So, I set my cruise control for ‘25’ (when on the ‘other’ parts, not on the ‘steep’ parts), and pull over often to let the ‘idiots in a rush’ get past & on their way to see nothing at all. It amazes me that people will drive thousands of miles to not see what they came to see?

On one stretch of flatish road, being closely followed by an ‘impatient minivan’ (no joke, you should have seen him fuming and pacing around when we were waiting for our turn to get through one of the construction roadblocks), we saw a ‘fox’ (later re-identified as a coyote) on our side of the road, but obviously looking to cross the paving. As I slowed down to let the little critter get across safely, ‘The Idiot’ tries to pass me on a section of ‘No Passing’ road!!

Seeing him accelerating up behind me in the rear view mirror, I hit the horns and the brakes simultaneously, which resulted in disrupting ‘The Idiot’ in his passing manoeuvre and in the coyote removing himself rapidly from harm’s way, avoiding ‘The Idiot’ running him down, which would have been inevitable if he (‘The Idiot’, not the coyote) had been left to his own devices!

Despite the pandemonium, I managed to stop the van, open the window, grab the digital camera, turn it on and take a fast snap of the coyote, which was by now heading up the steep bank on the opposite side of the road at a rapid pace. Before I could adjust for a second ‘close-up’ shot, he disappeared in the undergrowth and his progress could only be determined by the swaying of the grasses and brush as he headed up the hill.

After leaving Glacier National, already a ‘detour’ from our originally intended path, we decide not to detour further to Waterton Park, and get back on track to Drumheller, reaching the USA/Canada border in the early afternoon. The border guard seems to be interested only in whether the Roadtrek belongs to us and is ‘Canadian’ (He is obviously unaware that they are actually made only in Canada!!), and whether I have had any ‘repairs or modifications’ made in the USA?

On the next leg of the journey I encounter one of the little complexities of life that can be encountered by trusting too fully in computers! Although I am vaguely aware that you can ‘tell Microsoft Streets & Trips what sort of roads you want to travel on’, one assumes that ‘it’ is clever enough to know what you should be doing?

The upshot of this is that we leave the main road North and end up driving towards Drumheller on a series of ‘secondary roads’ that change gradually from ‘double-lane, paint-marked asphalt’ at the turnoff from the highway, to ‘single lane asphalt’ to ‘oiled gravel’ to ‘compacted dirt’! This is not really a huge problem, since the roads are actually far from the worst I have driven, particularly if compared to some of the dirt tracks we have followed in our previous life’s travels in SA (like going to Cob Inn or Mazeppa Bay, in the Transkei) and our Roadtrek is built on a full 1-ton truck chassis.

HOWEVER, the trail which we are so faithfully following winds through very rural Alberta, with only a few little dorps (Afrikaans for small towns) along the way, all with ‘No Services’, specifically, NO GAS!!! With the needle having been hovering on ‘E’ for some while, we eventually reach the intersection of our dirt road with the Canada-1, and find a very welcome gas station right there!! We fill up and press on North.

If the guys in Montana think they have the monopoly on ‘Big Sky’ country, they obviously haven’t been directly North to Alberta!! In Montana, there is generally a fairly close ‘horizon’ bounded by some form of hills/mountains. Between the USA border and Drumheller, Alberta is literally as flat as a pancake, and you just see ‘rolling wheatfields’ for miles & miles in a full 360 degrees! (With the occasional oil/gas derrick!!).

Reaching Drumheller fairly late in the evening, we locate an RV/Camp operation on the outskirts and ‘self-register’. We drive around and pick a site to park, which is quite easy since there is literally nobody else there! (One other small car arrived some time later and tented around the corner from us).

Friday 14 Sept 2007

We head for the Royal Tyrell Museum, the world’s premier Dinosaur Research facility and we tour the exhibits for a few hours. The whole facility is ‘excellent’ (probably with voluminous thanks due to huge dollops of public funding).

Then we watch a short documentary and follow that with a 1-hour guided hike through the surrounding ‘badlands’, covering ground typical of where fossil remains are found. There have apparently been ‘finds’ in this very area, but they have been ‘worked’ a number of years ago. Interesting, but not exciting!

Back in Drumheller, near to the Visitor Centre is a Parking Lot designated for RVs and Buses. It adjoins a public park with tables and benches, backing on the local stream. There are again no ‘No Overnight Parking’ signs, so we elect to push our luck and stay the night. Since the Roadtrek is fully self-contained, not being in a serviced RV-site does not present a problem for us, even if we want to watch a DVD or read till the late hours, or use the loo!

I had put some rechargeable batteries in the digital camera yesterday (not being in places where reasonably priced replacements were available), and it suddenly ‘froze’, then indicated that the memory card was corrupted and must be reformatted. By some stroke of luck, I had downloaded the last 3 days worth of pics to the laptop just after breakfast this morning, so I only lost 3 pics which had been taken right there at the Museum!!

In order to justify exhorbitant expenditures on planned meals in the Banff and Jasper “Lodge’s”, Denise decrees that we will feast once again on ‘Bread and Chunky’, and we park in the Bus & RV lot near to the Visitor Centre, which again, like Cut Bank, has no signs saying ‘No Overnight Parking’.

While I am writing this log, parked in the back of the RV lot, sitting in the front seat of the Roadtrek with a beer next to me, after having eaten already, a local RCMP car comes across the lot, takes a slow pass in front of the van, stops, hesitates, then moves on again. I think we may yet see them back later tonight? Still, I doubt they will do worse than tell us to ‘Move On!’.

On the other hand, if you can camp out in tents in Beacon Hill Park with impunity, or on Parliament Hill for that matter, why not in our van in the RV Lot in Drumheller?