Thursday 19 July 2007

Back from the Badlands

I'm back from my family holiday in Alberta. The land was so starkly different from Ontario, I simply gawked out of my window for much of my trip. Mountains gliding across the distant horizons. Electric yellow-green canola fields commanding the eye. Gorgeous white windmills silently thrumming in the fields, often lined up to catch an invisble corridor of kinetic power for kilometers at a time.

Every once in a while, the land sloping sharply downward through a layered cake of every shade of beige and rust toward a riverbed that may or may not have water at the bottom. And may or may not contain fossils sprinkled throughout.

I have a lot I wish to blog about the trip. A very warm thanks to my travelling companions, and to our gracious hosts, my wife's cousins' and aunt & uncle, for all the fun and more travelling than was reasonable to indulge this paleo-nerd in looking for things millions of years old.

Over the next few weeks, likely topics I will blog include:

4 comments:

The Key Question said...

Welcome back!

Yes, the badlands is an amazing place. I went to Royal Tyrrell's in '98 - I'll never forget the dinosaurs and that Cambrian diorama. I still have an Allosaurus tooth I got from one of them fossil shops.

Looking forward to your posts about the trip!

Anonymous Coward said...

Yeah I wish we had badlands in Ontario. You know, other than toronto! All I found around here as a kid were ammonites. I've never been able to find a trilobite....

Glendon Mellow said...

Thanks for the welcome Lim!

Tyrrell was amazing. I picked up a lovely trilobite from one of those fossil shops down the road in Drumheller too. Incidentally, I read in the National Post that Drumheller is the fifth most popular community per capita to order the new Harry Potter book in advance.

Glendon Mellow said...

Thanks for the comment Anonymous Coward! I like your James Randi pic.

You're right. Our town could use some hoodoos. I've found a few impressions of circular jellyfish and ammonites. But trilobites seem to be elusive in Toronto.

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Posts over 14 days old have their comments held in moderation - I've been getting an unusual amount of spam for a guy who paints trilobites. I'll release it lickety-split though.

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