Bones, Blackfoot and Banff A trip across Western Alberta reveals the good in the Canadian Badlands, and the very best of the Canadian Rockies Endless Vacation, July/August 2006 By Matt Villano HUNCHED OVER a rectangular table at the Royal Tyrell Museum in the badlands of Alberta, Canada, technician Robin Cooke is busy bringing a dinosaur back to life. With a tiny jackhammer called an "air scribe," she chisels away at a truck-tire-sized blob of plaster, unearthing a black bone from its white cast. After 15 minutes of chipping, she sets down the drill and picks up a toothbrush to scrub away even more. Standing over Cooke's left shoulder, my archaeologist wife, Nikki, and I watch patiently as she works the bone. With my untrained eye, I can make out a circular shape in the center with fan-like protrusions on either side. Cooke asks if we know what kind of bone it is. I'm thinking shoulder, maybe hip, but Nikki blurts out the answer: "It's a vertebra!" Cooke smiles, and removes her goggles from her face. "You got it," she says. "You're looking at the vertebrae of a ceratopsian." Related to the triceratops, the ceratopsian appeared in the Cretaceous period, about 140 million years ago. So begins our visit to Drumheller, a town Albertans lovingly call the "Dinosaur Capital of Canada." Millions of years ago, this region northeast of Calgary was crawling with prehistoric reptiles. Over time, as the dinosaurs died, river deposits gently covered their bodies in layers of sediment, preserving the specimens for generations. In recent history-the last few thousand years-natural processes have exposed the bones. Today, all around the city, dinosaur bones protrude from wind-shorn stacks of sandstone called hoodoos. Drumheller sits on the edge of a protected area dubbed Dinosaur Provincial Park, the first stop on our weeklong journey through time from the Cretaceous to the present in Alberta's history. During the next eight days, Nikki and I will visit with the Blackfoot, who are believed to have settled the province hundreds of years before Europeans came and claimed it for their own. From there, we'll end our trip in Banff National Park, the country's oldest and most popular national park and part of the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks World Heritage site. First, however, come the dinosaurs. Dr. Donald Brinkman, paleontologist and head of curatorial programs at the Royal Tyrell, introduces us to Cooke in front of a window that enables visitors to watchher work, then he gives us a behind-the-scenes tour of the world-famous museum. The main collection room is a warehouse of ancient dinosaurs-huge shelves reaching 20 feet to the ceiling, overflowing with bones. Because the animals are organized by when they lived, walking down each aisle is like moving forward one million years in time. "We have stuff in here that most museums will never, ever see," Brinkman boasts, preening over the skull of a 75-foot ichthyosaur excavated from British Columbia in 1999. "We are lucky enough to be standing in one of the most incredible spots for paleontology in all of North America." Near the end of our visit, Brinkman takes us to a corner of the room with giant metal cabinets. Before the big reveal, he tells us that he collected the specimen we are about to see, and that the creature is roughly 75 million years old. He adds that this "dinosaur" closely resembles an animal we still have today. Nikki and I marvel as we lay our eyes on a perfectly preserved turtle shell. The shell has such intricate detail that it looks as if the animal climbed out of a pond just yesterday. In Drumheller, as we learn quickly, the distant past is never too far away. THE PAST IS ALSO PRESENT on the Siksika [Blackfoot] Indian Reserve, located about 90 minutes south of Drumheller along the banks of the Bow River. "With Siksika, everything has a story," explains Jeanette Many Guns, who meets us at the teepee-shaped Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park & Interpretive Centre to show us around. "For so many years, all we had were our stories. The only way to keep them alive is to share them." Most of these stories start with the phrase, "Back then." Many Guns, a stern woman who wears a bear claw around her neck, tells us that she is a direct descendant of Chief Sitting Bull, the last Sioux to surrender to the U.S. government in 1881. Standing outside the center, she points across the river to a non-descript grassy knoll, the very spot where the Siksika (under the leadership of Chief Crowfoot) signed a treaty with the Canadian government in 1877, relinquishing independence and their sacred land. Today, the 6,000-member Siksika are part of the Blackfoot Confederacy, a group of First Nations peoples, consisting of the Piikani and Kainaiwa tribes in southern Alberta and the Blackfeet across the border in Montana. Nikki and I first learned about the Blackfoot Confederacy in an informative exhibit at the Glenbow Museum in downtown Calgary. Now, Many Guns and her aunt, Yvonne Black Horse, make the exhibit come to life. From the center, which is set to open this September as of press time, the duo takes us to Chief Crowfoot's grave, a huge marble cross overlooking the Bow River. They tell us how the Blackfoot people got their name: After days of tromping through burned grass, their feet became black, and the name stuck. Just when Nikki and I think we can't become any more immersed in Siksika culture, Many Guns invites us to her family's house to meet the family bison. While Siksika used to kill wild bison to survive, most of the buffalo on the reserve today are privately owned and rarely used for meat. The one at Many Guns' home is a hulking beast with eyeballs the size of grapefruits. After watching the animal eat a can of oats in seconds, Many Guns invites us inside to have a feast of our own on bannock bread, a traditional pancake-like treat made of wheat flour, oil and water. "This is a snack the Blackfoot have eaten for hundreds of years," she explains. "Back then, they prepared it the same way we prepare it today." After our snack, Many Guns teaches us how to play Stick Games, a special gambling game that Siksika play at the annual August pow-wow in August. The game is an elaborate version of hide-and-seek; one player hides two bones-one notched-in his hands, and opponents must guess which hand contains the notched bone. Every correct guess garners one stick. For every incorrect guess, we must give up one stick. Try as we might, Nikki and I can't best the Siksika pros. Still, after a day of on the Siksika Indian Reserve, Nikki and I have won more than a simple game could ever bring. LATER IN THE WEEK, we follow the Bow River into the mountains. The driving is flat until Cochrane, where, after some chocolate-glazed donuts at Tim Horton's, we hit the foothills. Roughly 90 minutes west of Calgary, we pull off the Trans-Canada Highway in Banff, a railroad town that has become the heart of Canada's oldest protected land. Banff is a breathtaking hamlet at the base of four rocky crags, the king of them all, 9,836-foot Cascade Mountain. In 1883 workers from the Canadian Pacific Railway came upon natural hot springs now known as the Cave and Basin National Historic Site. Two years later, seeking to protect the spot from excessive development, the federal government stepped in and created a national park. "The Canadian government always had plans to keep Banff wild," says Peter Poole, principal at Arctos & Bird, a local development company that recently renovated The Juniper hotel on the outskirts of town and unearthed bison skulls while building the Bison Courtyard complex on Bear Street. "The wild nature of this place is what makes it so amazing." Nikki and I experience this nature first-hand. We hike into town along the Bow, taking a detour for a two-mile loop around the peaceful Fenland Trail near the banks of the Vermillion Lakes. We don't see any bears, but we do spot bear claw marks, evidence of the creatures sharpening their claws on nearby trees. I've seen bears before; my wife, on the other hand, is utterly panicked at the prospect of an encounter, so we high-tail it for the bustling downtown. Banff boasts a ski resort in Mount Norquay, and in many ways, it is a typical ski town-great restaurants, boutiques and tchotchke shops galore. On a sunny Wednesday, the main drag of Banff Avenue is as crowded as a New York City street. The mood is different up the Bow Valley Parkway at Lake Louise, one of the park's most famous alpine lakes. At the turn of the 20th Century when the Railway brought in Swiss guides to teach aspiring mountain climbers, this is where they came. Who could blame them? Not content with the view from afar, Nikki and I park our car in a public lot and hike around the north shore. The hike is relatively flat, so we traverse the trail briskly. After 20 minutes, we reach a signed junction indicating a new trail that leads to a plain of six glaciers. We contemplate continuing, but decide instead to linger and enjoy the calm. In that moment, surrounded by mountains and lake, Alberta finally stands still, and all I can hear is my breath.