Badlands or good lands? It’s all in the eye of the beholder

Hoodoos, buttes, caves, gullies, coulees, and mesas have hidden outlaws and dinosaurs for hundreds and millions of years in southern Saskatchewan and Alberta, but their eroded layers are still on display for anyone who cares to venture off the Trans Canada Highway and dip below the prairie.

They’re called badlands, a term that comes from the French for “les mauvaises terres à traverser,” meaning “bad lands to cross.” When you’re a fur trader hauling a giant canoe and hundreds of pounds of pelts, you’d definitely mutter under your breath about these bad lands, with probably a few more explicit expletives thrown in. But for dinosaur fossil hunters, outlaws seeking caves, rum runners, and history and geology buffs, they’re fantastic lands.

Our badlands tour started wonderfully, and only got better. We began in south-central Saskatchewan where the Big Muddy Badlands upset the notion that this province is all flat. This seriously cool valley straddles the American border and was a mecca for cattle rustlers, train robbers and liquor smugglers who needed places to hide out.

Butch Cassidy and his gang – perhaps the most famous – planned an escape route called the Outlaw Trail, with the Big Muddy as the first, most northerly stop on a series of hideouts that led down through Montana to New Mexico. That was in the late 1800s; liquor was also smuggled across the border during prohibition.

We learned all that at the Bengough (pronounced Ben-goff) Museum. (Since I had already broken my promise to avoid museums, we went in to this small one; it was easy to physically distance ourselves from one other couple in attendance.) (As an aside, it’s depressing when things you used in your lifetime are displayed in a museum. Exhibit A: a bonnet hair dryer.)

Ancient glacial melt waters formed the valley, which is up to three kilometres wide in places, and 60 kilometres long. The museum also taught us that coal was mined in the Big Muddy, which makes sense since dinosaurs were also discovered in the badlands.

From Bengough, we drove south to Castle Butte – the crowning glory of the Big Muddy. The castle-shaped mound of sandstone, clay, alkali and coal deposits sits on private ranch land, but the owner allows people to visit as long as they behave themselves. We crossed a couple of Texas gates – bars laid across a ditch in the gravel road so cattle won’t cross – and followed the winding washboard road for seven kilometres down the valley. We waved to a man mowing the shoulder and, after we passed him, the strong smell of sage wafted up.

“There it is!” I shouted, as the 200-foot-high butte came into view. It’s rather spectacular – like a mini Uluru. The mighty power of erosion carved thousands of ridges and valleys in the mound, each with their own ridges, valleys, shapes, colours and textures.

We went into one of the caves – surprisingly cool when it was blistering hot outside. The mud-like wall near the entrance changed to sandy stone inside. Bill climbed in and up ahead of me. “Come on! It keeps on going and going,” he urged me. But it was too narrow for me, so I turned back long before he did.

You can climb a steep narrow trail to the top for what I’m sure is a spectacular view over the ranch land and eroded edges of the valley all around. However, my knees and Bill’s feet were not up to the task; instead, we hiked the quarter mile around the base and marvelled at how weather has eroded the ancient monument.

The small town of Coronach offers guided tours of the Big Muddy – where the tour guide rides in your vehicle, along with the keys needed to open gates into private land where many of the outlaw caves sit. We had taken the tour in 2008 – and it was excellent – but didn’t feel comfortable with the idea during Covid. And besides, all the tours for the next day or so were booked.

Instead, we recalled our memories of the Sam Kelly Caves where outlaws hid out and the nearby caves for their horses. Then, we drove up to the town of Willow Bunch and took Hwy 705, a gravel road that crosses through the valley. You can see long vistas of the badlands but you don’t get right up close like the road in to Castle Butte. The great Sioux Chief Sitting Bull and his followers lived and hunted in southern Saskatchewan until 1881 when they crossed the Big Muddy on their way back to North Dakota. Now, all the locals wave when you meet on the road – that one-finger-lift-from-the-steering-wheel type of wave that’s friendly yet cool.

The next day we ventured further west to Grasslands National Park, which is split into two blocks. We had visited the bison in the West Block in 2008, so decided to explore the East Block this time. There, we discovered more badlands! In fact, there’s the 11-kilometre Badlands Parkway – newly paved – that leads you along the top edge of a long valley, like the Big Muddy. Six stops along the parkway have short trails out to viewpoints and information panels on the valley edge. A hot wind swirled the scents of sweetgrass and sage around us. Grasshoppers buzzed, clicked, and sang. There were no human sounds (other than us), but it was not silent.

Panels at one of the viewpoints talked about life for the Zahursky family that had attempted to farm there 100 years ago, giving up after 30 years. Not an easy place to make a living. The soil is better suited for ranching i.e. grazing cattle. My friend Robert told me his wife’s father was born and raised in the 1920s on land that eventually became part of the park’s West Block. What I particularly like about Grasslands is that when the park was formed, they created the campgrounds from former homesteads, so that the native prairie lands would remain intact.   

The Saskatchewan badlands were a warm-up for Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, east of Calgary. Driving in to the park, the prairie is flat, and the badlands fall away below in the Red Deer River valley. We stood on the rim and looked down. It’s simply stunning – the most concentrated valley of hoodoos and mesas and other formations that I had ever seen.  

UNESCO designated the park a World Heritage Site in 1979 because it “contains the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of Upper Cretaceous dinosaur fossils in the world,” according to the plaque. And what a treasure trove!

The added bonus is the park is free to enter and hike around. You pay only for a campsite or $4 per adult for the Visitor Centre, which we happily paid and learned about how the badlands were formed and when and how the dinosaurs came to be found.

Then we went out to explore the various hiking trails that lead you through the hoodoos, buttes and mesas. In two spots, buildings had been erected over dinosaur bones exactly where they were found.  

One trail told about the Great Canadian Dinosaur Rush, similar to a gold rush, when collectors swarmed the area from 1910 to 1917 and sent 75-million-year-old fossils to museums around the world.  

In 1911, Barnum Brown began unearthing a wealth of fossils as lead collector for the American Museum of Natural History. The Canadian government decided it should get its act together and sent Charles Sternberg in 1912 to collect specimens for the National Museum of Canada. (Sternberg was American; no Canadian experts were available.) He arrived with his three sons and together, until 1916, they unearthed 16 skeletons, many of which were first-time discoveries and are still part of our national collection today. Two sons, Charlie and Levi, continued fossil hunting after their father retired. Brown and the Sternbergs competed for fossils, but there were so many that the competition remained relatively friendly.

Charlie began a system of marking and recording the quarries where fossils were found, staking over 100 of them himself. The Royal Tyrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller continues the system today; about 250 quarries have yielded some 300 dinosaur skeletons plus countless other mammal and plant fossils.

Techniques for collecting fossils haven’t changed much in 100 years and, with erosion, fossils are still exposed every year. We walked around a quarry where Brown had worked, examining the stones on the ground, the sandstone formations, and the layers exposed in the hills, trying to spot a dinosaur or at least trying to image others doing it. Intense heat, pounding rain, and vicious insects would have made it a lot of hard work, yet endlessly fascinating.

For us, the badlands were not “les mauvaises terres à traverser” but rather fascinating places that are so much more interesting than fields of wheat by the Trans Canada. We took the longer road out west and loved it.